Selling Intelligence (formerly Selling the Cloud)

In Part 1 of Selling Intelligence, Chris Kobus, Chief Revenue Officer at Genlogs, joins Mark Petruzzi and KK Anderson to explore what it takes to build a revenue engine that can scale across people, markets, and changing business priorities.

Chris shares his leadership philosophy around developing talent from within and explains why experience alone does not determine whether someone can succeed in enterprise sales. He discusses the importance of finding people with the right attitude, drive, and willingness to learn, then giving them the coaching, playbooks, and real-world exposure they need to grow.

The conversation also examines the expanding role of the modern CRO. Chris explains why revenue leadership goes far beyond managing sales and hitting the current quarter’s number. From pipeline and ICP strategy to marketing, business development, channels, pre-sales, and revenue operations, the CRO must understand and manage the full revenue lifecycle while preparing the organization for what comes next.

Chris also shares how Genlogs approaches verticalization across very different buyer markets, why specialized go-to-market playbooks matter, and how leaders can introduce change without creating unnecessary chaos across the organization.

What You’ll Learn:

• Developing Talent from Within: Why attitude, curiosity, drive, and willingness to learn can matter as much as previous enterprise sales experience.
• Leading from the Field: How revenue leaders can build trust and develop stronger teams by working alongside sellers instead of managing from an “ivory tower.”
• Coaching Beyond the Playbook: Why frameworks like MEDIC only create value when leaders continually challenge sellers on discovery, economic buyers, budget processes, urgency, and deal strategy.
• Owning the Full Revenue Lifecycle: How the CRO role extends beyond sales to pipeline, ICP strategy, marketing, business development, channels, pre-sales, revenue operations, retention, and expansion.
• Balancing Today and Tomorrow: Why CROs need to manage current-quarter performance while anticipating future growth needs and identifying where the revenue engine could break.
• Verticalizing with Purpose: How specialized go-to-market playbooks can help teams navigate different buyer environments without creating organizational chaos.

Key Topics:

• Building and developing high-performing revenue teams
• Promoting BDRs and other talent from within
• Hiring for attitude, drive, and growth potential
• MEDIC, discovery, and enterprise sales coaching
• Consulting skills and value engineering in go-to-market leadership
• The difference between a CRO and VP of Sales
• Owning the end-to-end revenue lifecycle
• Pipeline, ICP, TAM, and annual operating plan alignment
• Balancing short-term execution with long-term growth
• Building trust through transparency with executive leadership
• Verticalization and specialized go-to-market playbooks
• Scaling the revenue engine without creating organizational chaos

Guest Spotlight: Chris Kobus

Chris Kobus is Chief Revenue Officer at Genlogs, a freight intelligence company. His career began in consulting at Accenture before he moved into value engineering and technology go-to-market leadership. That background shaped his approach to customer value, team development, and building scalable revenue organizations. At Genlogs, Chris oversees a broad revenue mandate spanning sales, marketing, business development, channels, pre-sales, and revenue operations.

Resources & Mentions:

• Genlogs
• Accenture
• MEDIC
• Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
• Total Addressable Market (TAM)
• Annual Operating Plan (AOP)
• Accelerant Growth Solutions (AGS)

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Mark Petruzzi (00:29)

Welcome to Selling Intelligence. I'm Mark Petruzzi.

KK Anderson (00:33)

And I'm KK Anderson.

Mark Petruzzi (00:34)

And most revenue leaders inherit a title before they inherit the job. You get handed a quota, a team, and a seat at the table, and you spend the next few years figuring out how much of the business actually belongs to you. Our guest today runs one of the broadest CRL mandates we have covered on this show: sales, marketing, biz dev channels, pre-sales, and revenue ops.

would have done in line into customer success as well.

KK Anderson (01:04)

Chris Kobus is Chief Revenue Officer at Genlogs, a freight intelligence company that recently closed a $60 million Series B. He started his career in consulting at Accenture before moving into a value engineering role at a supply chain technology startup. And that background shapes how he builds go-to-market motions today. He's also selling into a market that has never had to buy what he's selling before.

Which means his team has to help buyers see a problem they didn't know they had. Chris, welcome to selling intelligence.

Chris Kobus (01:38)

Hi everyone, thanks for having me.

Mark Petruzzi (01:40)

Yeah, we're happy to have you here, Chris. Thank you. So let's jump with our first topic, leadership philosophy. And a real core point on that, team development over just our recruiting. So you said that developing a rep

who didn't originally know enterprise go to market can be just as important a win as landing a new customer. What does that development process actually look like on your team?

Chris Kobus (02:04)

Yeah, it's a good question, Mark. I think there's a couple of things that I would address there. I think that at the end of the day, having quality people is incredibly important. But I also think that it's just as important, if not more important, to make sure you have the right people and the right skill set and they're not always one and the same. so in my experience, I've worked with several folks that maybe didn't have the right set of experiences as they got into more of an enterprise sales motion, but were very eager to learn. They had the right

perspective, the right appetite, if you will, to understand what it takes to win, to understand what questions and tasks and what they need to pursue with customers, and to understand what winning looks like and and sort of what the the task at hand is. in terms of working with those individuals to develop them, I think it takes a couple things. And there's a couple things that I would certainly highlight that I think are relevant for my experience.

number one, and this is sort of philosophy I have as a go-to-market leader, is the team has to see you sort of in battle, right? I have always been very against what I think many call sort of the ivory tower approach, which is, you're sitting in front of Salesforce or in front of Slack or in an office or whatever, and saying, like, hey, where are the numbers? What's happening here, et cetera. and I think what's really important as a leader is the team sees you in battle with them.

And that can be your presenting to a customer a business case or helping them to find a use case. It could be you working with a customer to help them negotiate. It could be you working with other teams to make sure we're driving all the right, the right motions. so I say that and I relate it back to the question around what does it take to sort of develop those people. I think having that mindset of being in battle with them, I think is really important. I also think what's equally important is you have to have the playbook.

Right. So one of the things that I'm very passionate about that I know many, if not all, sales leaders in the enterprise tech space are passionate about is medic, right? And understanding it's more than just an acronym, which is a phrase I've heard thrown around quite a bit. so constantly challenging sellers that maybe don't have the experience with Medic or don't, maybe haven't figured out how to identify a champion in an account or an economic buyer or so on.

Challenging them when they think that right they have the right answers in a proper way to say, hey, you think maybe what a budgeting process looks like or who the economic buyer is. But have you asked them if they have budget authority? Have you asked them, if they don't have direct budget authority, how does budget get released? Have you asked them simple, simple questions around like how do they typically partner with technology vendors? What needs to get done? And I think that appropriate constant challenging.

is where I've seen people that have the right perspective, they maybe have the right experience, get ramped up very quickly. and the last point I'd mention on this particular topic is to me it's really important. and the reason it's so important is everyone's Rolodex will eventually come dry. Right. And I say that in the following sense is you can have several open head count and have all the confidence in the world that you have the right folks in your network with the right experience and the right perspective that are going to come in and be successful.

But that will not work every time. That will either run dry or you will have to rely on folks that maybe, that would had been with the company that are that are entering a new role or getting into the business by some other channel that don't necessarily have the right experience, but have the right perspective, right, on what it takes to win. So I think, being in the field, demonstrating to them sort of that you want to be in the field with them.

that you're willing to put in the work yourself. and then constantly challenging them. It's not like here's a lesson on medic. I'll go back to that example, and we're all done, but constantly challenging them on how they're doing discovery, how they're thinking about budget release cycles, how they're thinking about working with closed plans, driving urgency, I think is what balances out how coming in with the right perspective and then rapidly building that right skill set.

KK Anderson (05:24)

Good stuff, Chris. it's the attitude. And if when you say perspective, like it's their attitude. If they've got that grit, the unconditional commitment, the will, the personal accountability to be able to execute, then with your playbook or your process or your structure around how your customers buy and how you sell.

then they're gonna have a much greater chance of being successful. And, they don't need to have, 20 years as an enterprise at seller to be able to come work with you. So I love that. so take me through like the the interview process. Let's say, you're promoting from within. I imagine that's like a BDR role. what are you listening for in an interview, that tells you that someone has all of that or and

they've got that grit and that attitude.

Chris Kobus (06:09)

Yeah, it's a good one. I think the one of the first things I look for are they eager, driven, and motivated and to your point, have the right attitude to go above their swim lane or outside of their swim lane. So we have a really amazing team of BDRs here at Gen Logs. And I am very passionate about and and I know Gen Logs is as well, if we have the right people in the business to find ways to promote from within.

And one of the things that I look for is has that individual, and let's use the BDR, a business development rep as maybe example, typically their mandate to the business is to work with business development leadership and then their their account executive teammates to go after target accounts, to create healthy dialogue and conversations with accounts that would fall in line with our ICP, our ideal customer profile, to generate quality pipeline for the reps to then push to closure.

One of the things I look for when we consider moving BDRs into an account executive role or at least evaluating that is do they have the drive to sort of go above and beyond their mandate? So what do I mean by that? Right. Well, what I mean by that is it's more than just their metrics around how much pipeline they've generated. It's their eagerness to say, hey, I'd love to sit on a discovery call, even though this is qualified and I've kind of hit my metric with it. I'd love to sit on a discovery call with an account executive to understand how they do it.

What questions do they ask? how do they think about defining use cases? How do they think about starting to ask questions around Medic? And I think what happens there is not only do you have resources that have been successful within sort of their mandate, but then they start to build knowledge and in many cases obtain tribal knowledge if they're sitting on customer meetings or discovery calls or whatnot, they're starting to build experience and tribal knowledge around what it takes to deliver in that next role.

so that's absolutely one of the first things that I sort of challenge on and sort of try to certainly try to understand. and I think the second thing that I'd highlight is the eagerness to just generally the eagerness to understand what you want next in your career. not every business development representative wants to be an account executive. Some want to move into leadership, some pre-sales or partnerships or something else. I always look for understanding.

What does that individual or that teammate want in the next phase in their career? and I think the importance there, and the importance with many things when it comes to promotions, when it comes to hiring from within, is finding the equilibrium between what's right for the business and what's right for the teammate. And they're not always one-on-one, but if you can find that equilibrium between here's what the business needs, here's the need, and here's what the teammate wants in the next part of their career, and we see general alignment there.

That's where I find the most success to occur.

Mark Petruzzi (08:32)

So Chris, that's really helpful and it ties back to lots of the things we do even at AGS, Accelerant Growth Solutions. we have been working, KK especially for a longer period of time, has been working with

incredible assessments that help you determine in the hiring process exactly what's behind the interview per se. if they really do have that grit or that curiosity that you're looking for in all these other areas. So that's something that we do the same way you do. just trying to figure that out on an interview, but we also love having

the good old data behind it as well.

Chris Kobus (09:09)

Yeah, I think the one thing I would address there, I like the way you phrase it, That the data is important, So if you're looking at a teammate to promote from within or bring in an outside resource, I think looking at numbers is crucially important. whether that comes from references or directly from the candidate. at the end of the day, I'll leave it here. one phrase that I love that's often thrown around sales is

It's the easiest function of the business to measure success. Like did you hit your numbers or or did you not?

Mark Petruzzi (09:31)

Yeah,

that's really what it's all about. So Chris, you started at Accenture and moved into a value engineering role at a support.

supply chain startup before you ever were in a quota carrying seat. How did that path shape the way you build and coach teams today?

Chris Kobus (09:45)

Yeah, that's one of the parts of my experience and sort of my story as it relates to my career that I'm most proud of and I often most reflect on. I started my career, as you said, way back when at Accenture. and a large part of my mandate was working with clients and and large scale enterprises to deploy technology, test technology, design technology, recommend technology, and so on. and it wasn't necessarily selling rules.

Right for the most part. but I often call it college after college, where you get on these large-scale projects and you're challenged to learn and learn very rapidly and learn about everything from how to interact with customers and clients, how to build and deliver quality deliverables, how to listen, how to relay and how to synthesize the challenges customers are surfacing and how to replay that back to them in the context of how.

you as a partner or as a vendor can help, right? And as you go through those experiences, you build all those skill sets very rapidly. and part of my career in terms of where I really kind of found my place in the tech go-to-market space is when I eventually left Accenture and left the consulting space and arrived in the technology world, where, as you said, I started as a pre-sales engineer value consultant

KK Anderson (10:48)

Mm-hmm.

Chris Kobus (10:49)

where my mandate was

working with customers to ensure there was consensus on the business case and the ROI of the the technology they were evaluating. And I was able to apply all those experiences and all those skills that I had built around, again, without repeating the full list, but like, how do you interact and talk to customers? How do build trust? How do you build quality deliverables? how do you work with a level of integrity with a customer to say, hey, listen, here's what you need, here's what you don't need, right?

how do you think about building out that robust message so it's easily ingestible for them to understand? and you're building consensus and conviction of what the technology is able to do and what it's going to deliver for their business. and that was a really profound experience for me in seeing those consulting skills translate into sort of a go-to-market role where I was able to apply those consulting experiences and skill sets.

with, great teammates that I had in the in the sales world and maybe sort of a natural, skill set, if you will, of wanting to interact with clients and wanting to help drive expansion in the business. and I often challenge a lot of folks that are earlier on in their career when they maybe don't know what they want to be when they grow up yet, but a lot of this is of interest to them is to really consider what consulting can mean at the start of your career because it can lead to hundreds of different avenues after.

KK Anderson (11:59)

You know, sales is everywhere. I feel like I'm selling with my kids every day. So supply chain, any role that you're in, like everything is sales, isn't it? okay, let's move on, Chris, to the second topic. And we've heard a lot about this on the show. And I'm really curious to learn more about your perspective and how kind of you're redefining the CRO role and really embracing owning.

the

full revenue engine. And and we chatted about there being, like what's the difference between a VP of sales and a true CRO? So just give us a kind of a brief overview of how you see that. I think that's going to be valuable for our audience.

Chris Kobus (12:34)

Yeah, absolutely. I think when you think about the CROC, that means owning the full life cycle of revenue, And that's not just selling deals and renewing deals. That's as you consider the overall AOP, the annual operating plan. What is the business trying to achieve for that given year, for that given quarter, and so on and so forth? and then backing into how it's achieved. Everything from hey, if this is our bookings target, what is the pipeline needed based on

Conversion rates and all that fun stuff that's needed to get there based on renewal weight, renewal rates. How should we think or rethink about our ICPs and the customers we're going after based on growth goals? What new TAM or addressable markets do we need to unlock and further explore? So to me, that's what the CRO seat is all about is the end-to-end lifecycle of revenue from the start of it, which is brand awareness and an early stage pipeline to qualify pipeline.

And when I say qualified pipeline, I don't just mean that you're checking the boxes on Bant as an example, but I mean that qualified pipeline directly correlates and falls in line with the targeted customers that we want to go after, right? the customers that we know will be sticky and healthy revenue that will continue to contribute of that revenue life cycle where they're taken through a very value-oriented process so they understand the value associated with making the investment in the technology.

But also that they're geared up for a proper and a linear journey as a customer, where it's like, hey, here's why you invest in the technology today. Here's your journey as a customer, where you have expansion opportunities throughout the next year or three years or whatever it is, where not only are they continuing continuing their use and being a good partner and a good customer, they're expanding their use and they're sharing their use and they're advertising their use that continues to sort of contribute to that circle. So to me.

that is the basis of the role of the CRO is you own sort of the how do how do we achieve the and exceed the plans in the AOP? And it truly is the end-end lifecycle. Whereas I see a VP of sales living in the field with the account executives, or those account executives are working directly with a VP of sales on deal mechanics, on account strategy and deal strategy, on

Going back to some of our earlier comments, coaching reps on medic and having and ensuring that's aligned and supporting discovery and things like that. so to me, it's CRO is like the end-to-end life cycle of revenue and ensuring that that circle is continuing to spin and expand. Whereas a VP of sales is the day-to-day field general, if you will, that's in the field with sellers, ensuring that the forecast is being hit.

highlighting issues, providing coaching and so on to the account executive. So they're in a position to only not only meet, but also exceed their number.

Mark Petruzzi (15:05)

Right on, Chris. so with all of that, how do you keep a board or your CEO focused on the health of the full revenue engine when the instinct is always to ask about this quarter's number and you what each sales rep is contributing this week, this day, this hour?

Chris Kobus (15:22)

Yeah, what I would say is the following. It's a good topic. I am very blessed in my role here at Gen Logs to have just phenomenal leadership and phenomenal founders where to me it's a balance of I try to I ensure I do my part in being super transparent and sharing all the good and the bad, right? It can't all be good, it can't all be bad, right? Of how the business is performing, and then what issues we may have and what we're doing to resolve those.

and I find providing that level of transparency leads to really good trust, right? So I'm in a position where I'm very blessed. I certainly have had those experiences in the past, where you have, CEOs and other leaders going, like, hey, what's happening this quarter? and not taking that more macro, broader look at the business. I'm in a position now where we have just the the best founders and leadership that I've had where they have a really good macro view of the business and there's an inherent trust.

that I think's been been established by being transparent and again, sharing, hey, here's what's working, here's maybe what's not, but what we're doing, what we're doing to resolve. I know in my in my prior lives when maybe I've had some of those experiences, it's challenging, right? Because especially in the role of a CRO, it can't be all what numbers are this quarter? It can't be all what are the numbers going to be next quarter, and it can't be all, how do we think about the year and how do we think about current year plus one and so on.

It has to be all of it, right? And I think what really allows you to think about all of it candidly is proper hiring. Right. I think you've got to have the right folks in seat. I'm also very blessed in my current role. I have an an exceptional group of sales leaders that support what we're doing in the go-to-market organization, know their mandate and how they're what they're accountable for to the business and are able to deliver it.

But, again, I know that as I said in in prior in prior lives, I have had those challenges. And look, I think at the end of the day, the best thing to do is to have that balance, right? It can't be all current quarter. It can't be all next quarter. It can't be all

KK Anderson (17:02)

Right.

Chris Kobus (17:03)

what's next year. You have to sort of think about how the puzzle pieces are building. You have to be able to predict. I think this is a really important role as a CRO. Is I often use the analogy with my team. My job.

was, and I'm using a little bit of the past tense here, was to build the go-to-market machine. and I'm not saying it's perfect and I'm not even saying it's done, but well we've got a lot of the foundation built. My job now is to how to make the machine go faster and and just as important, if not more per important, predict when it's gonna break and where it's gonna break and have a remedy

KK Anderson (17:31)

Mm, mm-hmm.

Chris Kobus (17:33)

plan ready to fix it. and I think that's often that's something that's often missed. So yeah I think all those things that's how I weigh all those things and all those factors.

and I think, again, having that balance of what does the current quarter look like, what does the rest of the fiscal year look like, what does that mean for future years within the company, understanding how to make the machine go faster, being able to anticipate and predict where the machine is going to break, I think just super important.

KK Anderson (17:55)

Really,

really good stuff. So walk me through we've we talked about verticalization as part of your go-to-market strategy. And so, you described in our prep call that you're selling into buyer worlds as different as like a government agency and like a commercial insurer. I don't know how you get much different than that. Like how do you, organize a team around those specialties without spreading everyone too thin, but still honoring

and encouraging them to specialize. Like tell me a little bit about how you do that.

Chris Kobus (18:21)

Yeah, it's a topic that's very top of mind for me. most go-to-market organizations as they navigate through the maturity and growth curves within their respective businesses, soon verticalize, right? And that's something that we're undergoing a bit of today. but I also think it's a really good balance. And what I mean by that is the various customer channels you're going and selling into, whether that's commercial auto insurance, shippers and brokers, public sector organizations.

There's certainly a lot of common denominators because we're all selling for the most part the same, the same solution. But there's also a lot of idiosyncrasies that come with selling into those into those channels. And one of the things that I think is really important is making sure that as you start to verticalize, you're equipping your teams for

KK Anderson (19:00)

Right.

Chris Kobus (19:00)

success. So one of the things we've invested very heavily in is to build out the proper go-to-market playbooks, if you will, that really break down those verticals on.

Here's what that vertical is. Here's why they're interested and have appetite for our technology. Here's idiosyncrasies that come with medic. here's what an economic buyer most likely will be in this space versus this space. here's the target accounts that we want to go after. Cause just so just because we say like commercial auto insurance as an example doesn't mean every company that's involved in commercial auto insurance wouldn't necessarily be a customer today. Maybe they would be in the future. But how do you think about prioritizing that?

I think the most important thing I would highlight here, and all that is certainly important. but one of the things that I've learned in my career, and I'll go back to some of the comments and conversation for earlier, it's really important to know what good is. It's equally, if not more important to know what doesn't work and what bad is. And the reason I say that is this I've been in many organizations that it's like every week there's something new account reassignment, verticalization, territory mapping.

And while the intentions might be noble, the challenge that comes with that, with doing that very rapidly and it not in a false way is complete and utter chaos, right? Where you have account executives and pre-sales teammates and ramp ops all in disarray because maybe accounts were moved out of their name or they have new accounts in their name or what have you. And there is a there's an impact, and in many cases, severe impacts to having that level of chaos in a business. So I think it's really, really important to make sure

KK Anderson (20:20)

Yeah.

Chris Kobus (20:20)

you.

balance out doing things in a very thoughtful, proper way, but also moving with a with an element of velocity to ensure that you're working towards your ICP goals, your revenue goals, and ultimately your AOP plan.

Mark Petruzzi (20:34)

Excellent, Chris. So, Chris, all of this gets at many of the things CROs are wrestling with today. Where the job actually starts and stops, just in general, how do they focus on making sure they balance, as you put it, the short-term goals with the long-term term approaches and initiatives that you need to be successful? We're going to pick right back up here.

KK Anderson (20:56)

So, Chris, let's close up part one here. And I know the audience is gonna be waiting excitedly for next week's drop. but for those out there listening, what Chris just described about building the vertical motion, building a vertical motion from scratch is exactly the kind of work that we live for here at AGS, because so much of winning isn't about doing more, it's about really spotting the small shifts in seller.

behaviors like around medic and discovery and getting in the trenches with them, just as you described, Chris. And that's a lot of what we do here at AGS. And if you're interested, come and check us out. you can learn more at www.get-ags.com. So join us next week for part two with Chris Kobus.

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In Part 2 of Selling Intelligence, Rick Nee, Chief Revenue Officer at Alcatraz AI, joins Mark Petruzzi and KK Anderson to explore the people and culture behind a scalable go-to-market organization.

Rick explains why vertical specialization should go beyond assigning sellers to industries. Sales leaders need to develop enough expertise to become trusted voices in their markets, understand the problems their customers face, and bring insights that make conversations more valuable and less transactional. He shares how Alcatraz encourages sales directors to treat their vertical like their own business, develop informed opinions, participate in industry conversations, and build deeper customer relationships over time.

The conversation also explores Rick’s approach to building talent from within. He explains why visible career paths for SDRs can strengthen culture and retention, how internal promotions can create momentum throughout the organization, and why leaders should look beyond the traditional SDR-to-AE path when developing emerging talent.

What You’ll Learn:

• Building Vertical Thought Leaders: How sales directors can develop deeper industry expertise and become trusted resources for customers rather than purely transactional sellers.
• Treating a Vertical Like a Business: Why sellers should think like business owners within their vertical and use events, speaking opportunities, associations, customer conversations, and content to build credibility.
• Using Team Selling for Complex Buyers: How sales, engineering, product, and customer success can work together to build trust and support conversations across different levels of the customer organization.
• Developing SDRs From Within: Why Rick prefers creating internal career paths and how visible promotions can show SDRs that there is a real opportunity to grow inside the organization.
• Finding the Right Next Role: Why SDR development does not always have to lead to an AE position, and how leaders can identify strengths that may fit account management, renewals, customer success, or other roles.
• Building a Culture That Retains Talent: How internal mobility, leadership attention, and meaningful development opportunities can contribute to stronger retention in a startup environment.

Key Topics:

• Vertical specialization and industry expertise
• Sales directors as industry thought leaders
• Building trusted, non-transactional customer relationships
• Customer advisory boards and team selling
• Developing SDRs into future GTM leaders
• Internal promotion versus external hiring
• Career mobility across sales, CS, renewals, and channel roles
• Sales culture and employee retention
• Using data to continuously improve GTM decisions
• The continued importance of human selling in an AI-driven environment

Guest Spotlight: Rick Nee

Rick Nee is Chief Revenue Officer at Alcatraz AI. In this two-part Selling Intelligence conversation, Rick shares his approach to scaling go-to-market organizations through vertical specialization, data-driven decision making, talent development, and strong internal culture.

In Part 2, he focuses on developing people from within, helping sellers build meaningful industry expertise, and creating career paths that allow talent to grow alongside the organization.

Resources & Mentions:

• Alcatraz AI
• Daniel Pink
• To Sell Is Human by Daniel Pink
• Peter Drucker
• Customer advisory boards
• Vertical pod structure
• SDR career development and internal promotion

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🎧 Listen now and follow Selling Intelligence for more conversations with revenue leaders building the next generation of go-to-market organizations.

Mark (00:38)

Welcome back to Selling Intelligence. If you're just joining us, this is part two of our conversation with Rick Nee, Chief Revenue Officer at Alcatraz. Go back and listen to part one when you get the chance, but you can also start right here with us.

KK Anderson (00:53)

Now, three things from part one worth carrying forward. Rick's team went from three people to 25 in two years while the business tripled. He organizes by vertical pod rather than by segment or geography. And each pod runs its own PL, which is why he can walk into a board meeting after his six coffees and Starbucks every 30 days and not locking himself

Mark (01:15)

Yeah.

KK Anderson (01:16)

in a room. He can walk into a board meeting with data.

and return a figure instead of a headcount request. And before he changes any structure, he goes to that data, he forms his hypothesis because at the stage that he is in with Alcatraz, guessing gets really expensive really fast.

Mark (01:33)

Part two is the part most leaders find hardest to copy. The people, Rick, let's pick it back up.

Rick Nee (01:39)

Yeah.

KK Anderson (01:39)

All right, Rick. Okay, so let's talk about the sales director who wears a marketing hat, right? You ask your vertical sales directors, and I love this by the way, to put a marketing hat on and become thought leaders and to brand themselves as thought leaders in their industry. Like tell me why and what does that look like in practice?

Rick Nee (01:59)

Yeah, so it's something that I'm pretty passionate about. And I think it goes it ties back into this vertical strategy we were talking about, right? KK. So imagine you're just selling into enterprise, you're jumping from a finance meeting into an airport meeting into a higher ed meeting. there's just not enough time in the day. I you know, the data says that your average sales director, count executive spends

40 to 50% of their time internally, data cleanup, internal meetings, et cetera. Right. And so you you know that that we're always putting more on them than than they can do. So with the verticals, what we've sort of are thinking holistically is, hey, how do you become a thought leader in this so that it's a trusted relationship? To your point, with AI and just the amount of noise out there. I think.

And users are astute and they know when it's transactional and when they know you're actually trying to serve them. sounds cliche, but it's true.

I tell the story to a lot of folks that one of my best sales directors at my prior company, Authenticate, we had a vertical structure and he had so many trusted relationships and he was sort of a thought leader in in the threat space that the threat intel space that

He was a intermediary for folks that he had sold to into their next job when they had lost their job. so he was sort of a middleman that, but he was so plugged

KK Anderson (03:11)

Yeah.

Rick Nee (03:11)

into the vertical. and now, of course, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? That end user champion that's now leaving and going somewhere else, they're gonna, they're probably gonna buy that the product at another place. But we're asking our sales directors.

with the help of our product team and our product marketing team to think, okay, this is your business. This is your vertical. If you were a business owner and this was your company and you were only focused on this vertical, what and why would you do it? And that might mean, okay, I need to go to these specific shows that are focused on my industry. maybe I want to get a speaking spot.

And I want to talk specifically about perhaps a pain point or how customers are being served, right? And so you get that angle. it might be associations, it might be a blog post. but all of that is, learning that happens as that sales director has time and seats. So to be clear, right, when you hire somebody.

Okay, if they're plugged into that industry already, you're hiring somebody in the financial services that's coming to your company, easy, right? They're already plugged in, they probably have a pretty decent understanding. But for us, we got the right people on the bus and just said, hey, you're pretty passionate about security. You're enough about financial services or tech or whatever your vertical is, but now we're gonna ask you to dig deeper. And you're gonna do some some homework, you're gonna learn, you're gonna work with our team, our leadership team, and you're gonna start to take all of the things that you have learned.

And form an opinion. Form an opinion that adds value to your end customers that you can share. Whether it's a customer advisory board, too, that's another thing we're starting. form opinions, be a thought leader. And again, there's others that are helping, but as you get into that 12-month, 18-month, two years with the sales director, then all of a sudden you're learning from them. And that's where I know when it's working. When I have a question about earports.

I call our sales leader that runs critical infrastructure and I say to him, Hey, why don't they turn on this feature? Or what what did what are they doing here? And then he'll just educate me on that. And so again, I I just think the end users, they're looking for nuggets. They they've done enough inform research on your product and they probably have done some homework, but they're, you know, they're looking for

How you plug them into another part of the network, maybe trends that you're seeing. It's nothing to do with necessarily selling them anything else, although that will help. and it's not transactional. and it's working very, very well for us. it's something that takes time, and you can't do it with 10 verticals of your series A. You might only pick one vertical, but I would say give it a shot. Pick that vertical where

you have the best product market fit signal or the most traction and lean into that and then copy and paste once you have enough revenue or cash to to to invest in additional verticals, et cetera. So that's what we did is sort of let's pick the ones that make sense and then build out from there.

Mark (05:50)

So what if what if one of your directors is leading a session with chief information security officers at a customer advisory board? What goes into getting someone ready to hold that room?

Rick Nee (06:02)

Team selling. so for that, candidly, the way that the way that we think about it is if the sales directors are dangerous enough, and again, like when you're thinking about who you need to hire, I I just think it's better if you hire someone that understands the industry and is maybe a little bit more on the technical side. Nonetheless, if you're around that sort of session, you're probably

working with your head of engineering, your head of product, it might be success in some. It's probably someone that is thinking a little bit more deeper technically. But I think if you're doing that right and you have enough trust and you've earned their respect, then I think, bringing a larger group together always works. it could be it could be at that level, could also be at the director level.

whoever, there's different avenues that we're going when we're thinking about customer advisory board. It could be the top, could be the middle of the funnel, it could be sometimes even the end users that are actually deploying the product. That's we believe a bottom up and a top down when we're thinking about these things because they both play a pretty critical role in not only buying your product, but actually using it and buying more of it.

KK Anderson (07:00)

Good

stuff. Rick, let's shift gears for a minute and talk about, building up.

and we spoke about this a lot, and I and I think this is it probably says a lot about the culture of the organization that you've built there, but you promote from the SDR seat up rather than hiring senior talent in from the outside. walk us through that ladder and and kind of what what your decision is there.

Rick Nee (07:22)

This is something I'm probably most passionate about. And I think everyone's heard that quote from Peter Drucker, culture each strategy for breakfast. you could have an okay product, scale to the moon with the culture in a team that is fully bought in and is rowing where the sum is greater than the parts, or can or you could have the inverse, you could have

A fantastic product with a bad culture and and and not do well at all. And I'm sure there's use cases or examples of both. I on the culture side, I prefer to hire SDRs ground up as we build them into the org. And why is that? Well, if you interview a lot of go-to-market teams, you'll hear

things like 40% turnover in SDRs. and then I'm asking, okay, is it enablement? are they too junior? but often what I hear, KK, is well, I've been an SDR for 16 months, 18 months, and I there's just no there's no path to promotion. And so I said, okay, leaning to that and say, well, what what's this about? Well, you know,

The sales leader came in, and as he or she has expanded, they bring in from the outside. That is a very demoralizing thing. That doesn't mean everybody is built from the ground up, but when you're thinking about your pods, SDRs that go and do maybe junior account executives, perhaps renewals, junior customer success based on their personality. Once you have four, five, six, seven of them promoted.

It becomes infectious. It becomes it becomes infectious. It just sort of like new SDRs come in and they say, Okay, I have a shot here. If I put my head down and I lean in and then they're getting trained from someone that's just been promoted, and it's just sort of this

KK Anderson (08:57)

Right.

Rick Nee (08:58)

goodness that sort of permeates through the org, it's a wonderful thing. Now, there are certain roles where you're like, Look, it's 20 I I need somebody with 20 years experience. it's a very

KK Anderson (09:07)

Of course.

Rick Nee (09:08)

They need a secret clearance, right? Okay. But but

KK Anderson (09:11)

Yeah.

Rick Nee (09:11)

not everybody sort of gets that. The the second piece to it is when you're hiring from SDR and then you promote them up, the economics are often much better as you promote them, right? So you could just pick a number, right? So let's just say an SDR is making 50K and you

KK Anderson (09:27)

Mm-hmm.

Rick Nee (09:27)

pull them into an account executive role.

in 18 months and they go from a 50k OTE to a hundred K. This is like life changing stuff for them, right?

KK Anderson (09:36)

Yeah, heck yeah it is.

Rick Nee (09:37)

right. it's all context and and it's relevant. Now if I were to go get that same, let's say, four to six years experience and I wanted to go get them from SaaS Company X, might be 175K.

And it's an unknown

It's an unknown variable, right? I mean, you can interview somebody and you have a good idea, but are they a good culture fit? Do they really do what they say they do? I mean, hopefully they do. And then you save on the just the the recruiting, the recruiting piece and you know, the fees you in there.

KK Anderson (10:02)

Sure. Mm-hmm.

Rick Nee (10:03)

I tell the SDRs, I meet with a lot of the SDRs one on one and maybe I'm one of the only CROs that that does this, but when I see an SDR with a lot of promise, I'm on their calendar and I'm

And and I have we have a profile of what we want for that role.

KK Anderson (10:17)

Mm-hmm.

Rick Nee (10:17)

generally athletes maybe had a job in college, there's very certain things we're looking for with like that that speak to your work ethic. Cause it's a hard job. But I'll get on the counter one of the one of these higher performing ones and say, Hey, hang tight for three more months. We're gonna find you a new role. This is this is an ROI on steroids because this person's like this the CRO's notice me, my team's noticed me.

I'm doing the right thing. And I see this light at the end of the tunnel because nobody wants to be an SDR forever. I don't think. Right. I mean, I don't a hard job, right?

KK Anderson (10:44)

Right. No, they don't. It's the hardest job in sales.

Rick Nee (10:48)

I believe it is, right? You're looking at projection rates through the

KK Anderson (10:50)

Mm-hmm. It's crazy

how we put people with zero experience in the hardest chart themselves. Yeah.

Rick Nee (10:55)

Right. Yeah.

and so it's a culture thing there. What's interesting and too is I tell all the SERs that come here, you're interviewing for the next year and a half, next year. And by time they get ready to move into a new role here, as we think about the pause and specialization and sort of what we like to do.

They may, this is the cool thing. They may have said, Hey, I'm gonna, I wanna be a I wanna be an account executive. I wanna be just like KK. Okay. And then a year in, they're like Rick, Josh, their direct manager. I really like the channel and the account management piece. I've been kind of seeing what they've been doing, and I kind of want to put my hat in the ring for that. I don't, I actually don't want to do that. Or I'll see a skill set in them, they're the way that

the way they organize data and the way that they like organize their day. I'm like, hey, you'd be really good running renewals. You don't even know it, but I just see the way that you work through the day. And this is where we think you're a good fit and where you'd be most effective. And this is what we're asking you to do. And 10 out of 10 times they're like, I'm getting a promotion, I'm getting more money. Let's do it. and so I'd hope in a like a two to four year cycle we'll see

And SDR go through two to three roles actually as they sort of

grow up into the Oregon as we need as we evolve in the different roles that we need. and then that just plugs into 90 plus percent retention, which at a startup, it cannot be understated how important that is.

KK Anderson (12:16)

Yeah.

Really, really, really impressive. Mm-hmm.

Mark (12:16)

Yeah, that is really important

stuff. Okay, let's go over to our rapid fire, which is five questions, same order, same questions every episode. so the first one, what was the first product or service you ever sold?

Rick Nee (12:32)

if recruiting counts after leaving the infantry as a marine lieutenant, I was then a captain and I was selling the Marine Corps. I was selling joining the Marine Corps to college graduates in the Bay Area, which is really hard.

Mark (12:46)

Mm. Yeah.

Rick Nee (12:48)

yeah, hey, don't take that private equity job. I want you to fly a jet or you know, I want you to be a JAG officer or whatever. So that was the first thing that that's actually

When I got out of the Marine Corps, that was where I decided I wanted to get in sales because it was fun trying to convince people of of the value of

KK Anderson (13:04)

Really cool.

Rick Nee (13:05)

yeah.

KK Anderson (13:05)

I did not know that you were in the Marines. That's really it's really cool. And it explains a lot, I think. Yeah.

Rick Nee (13:10)

well there you go. Yeah, I was

lieutenant and a captain in the Marine Corps before going into

KK Anderson (13:14)

That's amazing.

Wow. Thank you for your service. Okay,

Mark (13:16)

Nice. Yeah.

Rick Nee (13:17)

Thanks.

KK Anderson (13:17)

favorite CEO or CEO.

Rick Nee (13:19)

Has to be my current, right? my current CEO.

KK Anderson (13:22)

Aside

from your current.

Rick Nee (13:24)

I would say Jeff Glenn, CRO at Harmonic, really took me under my wing and saw something of me in a big company. It's really hard to stand out in a big company. and he promoted me twice in a big company and I think ultimately convinced me that I wanted to be in a startup. but when someone notices you when you're in that mid-level or you know, you think

KK Anderson (13:41)

Very good.

Rick Nee (13:41)

you're you're gonna stay in sales and you're just waiting for that person to believe in you, and he did. And

We still we're still in touch. He was actually a reference for me for this job that I'm in right now. He's just a great human.

Mark (13:50)

A leadership or go-to-market practice every sales and marketing leader should adopt.

Rick Nee (13:55)

I think we talked about a lot today. know your data early and often and continue to iterate and learn from that data. And if not, this job's not for you.

KK Anderson (14:04)

Okay, my favorite question, Rick. Advice you would give your twenty one year old self.

Rick Nee (14:08)

well, this one is like super important to me. But first life is not a dress dress rehearsal. Go do what you love. When people tell me I want to leave this company or I don't want to be in sales, I say you should follow that. So, and if you are gonna be in sales, you really have to believe in what you're selling. I think everybody's been in jobs maybe early in their career where you're just desperate to get in and you're selling something, you're like, I'm not really sure I

Believe in this. And that goes to the last part. If I could tell my 21 self, it's Ted Lasso, believe and believe. You gotta believe in yourself and what value you can bring to an org. A sales trainer taught me that 15 years ago, and I thought he was sort of I thought he was out there. I'm like, believe in yourself. What do you what this? But you really have to in this sales world. And if you do, good things will happen. I finally believe in myself and I'm 49. I did not when I was 21.

Mark (14:53)

Incredible. Favorite sales or marketing book?

Rick Nee (14:55)

To sell as human, Daniel Pink. I am very skeptical that AI is taking over the sales motion. I think sales is needed more than ever. I think people are craving human interaction, right? to some degree, AI is great, but to sell as human is written, I think 15

eighteen years ago and I think it's more relevant today than it was then. And I really encourage anyone that hasn't read it. Daniel Pink is is pretty awesome.

Mark (15:19)

Excellent. So Rick, this has been a great two episodes. for people who want to follow your work or learn more about what Alcatraz is building, where should they go?

Rick Nee (15:29)

I'm on LinkedIn. That's where I would recommend. Come I get hit up on LinkedIn all the time for chats and conversations and coffee. I love talking about this stuff. Come find me on LinkedIn, Rick Nee at LinkedIn, Alcatraz, and I will respond to you and we'll have a good conversation. I wanna I wanna help anyone that I can and vice versa. I believe there's we're all trying to we're all trying to do the same thing here, right? Which is grow and be successful.

KK Anderson (15:51)

I love it. Rick, fascinating conversation. We loved having you. Maybe one day you'll even come back and in a couple of years and tell us kind of where you've been. So thank you again.

Rick Nee (15:59)

Sounds good. I

really, really appreciate the time today. It was great to spend time with you, Mark and KK. Thank you so much.

KK Anderson (16:04)

All right.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this episode of Selling Intelligence, Rick Nee, Chief Revenue Officer at Alcatraz, joins Mark Petruzzi and KK Anderson to unpack what happens after a company reaches product market fit and the challenge shifts from finding customers to building a go-to-market organization that can scale.

Rick explains why revenue leaders should resist bringing a fixed playbook into a new company and instead use customer behavior, sales data, and the buyer journey to determine what the organization actually needs. He shares how Alcatraz has built its revenue structure around vertical pods, creating tighter feedback loops between sales, SDRs, customer success, and other customer-facing roles.

The conversation also dives into the importance of cleaning CRM data before making strategic decisions, identifying the metrics that actually matter, and reverse engineering performance by vertical to determine where to invest people, capital, and resources.

What You’ll Learn:

• Scaling After Product Market Fit: Why the GTM motion that wins your first customers may not be the one that gets you to the next stage of growth.
• Playbooks as Starting Points: Why proven sales frameworks should inform your strategy rather than dictate it.
• Building Around the Buyer Journey: How customer needs and sales complexity should shape hiring, team structure, and resource allocation.
• The Power of Vertical Pods: How organizing teams around specific industries can improve knowledge transfer, customer understanding, and feedback loops.
• Reverse Engineering Revenue Data: How sales cycle length, deal size, win rates, pipeline coverage, and land versus expand behavior can reveal where growth opportunities actually exist.
• Cleaning Data Before Scaling: Why CROs need to validate CRM data and remove misleading outliers before using it to guide major GTM decisions.

Key Topics:

• Scaling a GTM organization after product market fit
• Building a data-driven revenue strategy
• Why one-size-fits-all sales playbooks fall short
• Vertical pod structures and feedback loops
• Sales cycle and deal size analysis by vertical
• Pipeline coverage and win rates
• Land and expand revenue motions
• CRM data quality and RevOps
• Generalists versus specialists in early-stage companies
• Using AI to pressure test assumptions and uncover blind spots
• Prioritizing high-impact GTM initiatives instead of changing everything at once

Guest Spotlight: Rick Nee

Rick Nee is Chief Revenue Officer at Alcatraz, a Cupertino-based company focused on facial authentication for physical security. As a revenue leader, Rick focuses on solving the go-to-market challenges that emerge after product market fit, using data to determine how teams should be structured, which verticals deserve investment, and where companies can scale most effectively.

In this conversation, Rick shares a practical approach to building revenue organizations around real customer behavior rather than assumptions, industry benchmarks, or rigid playbooks.

Resources & Mentions:

• Alcatraz
• HubSpot
• Claude
• CRM and RevOps data analysis
• Vertical pod GTM structures
• AGS Two Millimeter Club

🎧 Listen now and follow Selling Intelligence for more conversations with revenue leaders on building smarter, more scalable go-to-market organizations.

Mark (00:30)

Welcome back to Selling Intelligence. I'm Mark Petruzzi here with my co-founder and co-host KK Anderson.

KK Anderson (00:37)

Here's a number we're sitting with. A sales organization that goes from three people to 25 in 24 months has effectively rebuilt itself every quarter. Most leaders in that position reach for the standard playbook because it's the fastest thing available. But our guest today treated the playbook as a starting point instead of an answer and went to his own data to decide what to keep.

Mark (01:00)

Rick Nee is Chief Revenue Officer at Alcatraz, the Cupertino company replacing badges with facial authentication, backed by more than $100 million in capital and trusted by Fortune 100 Enterprises AI data centers, airports, universities, and professional sports teams. Rick, welcome to Selling Intelligence.

Rick Nee (01:23)

Thanks for having me. I am very excited to be here. this is exciting and these are topics that I'm pretty passionate about.

Mark (01:28)

Excellent. All right, first topic, solving the go-to-market riddle. You have said that stage the stage that energizes you the most is the one right after product market fit. When finding customers who want to buy is no longer the problem. Describe what actually changes for a revenue leader at that moment.

Rick Nee (01:46)

It's a great question. So I didn't figure this out so a little bit later in my career. People ask, hey, do you want to work at a startup? And that can mean a lot of different things, a series D with a thousand customers versus a pre-series or series A, where you're trying to find that product market fit. And so I think you have to like think about where you want to be on that journey. and then if we really define what product market fit means.

I was listening to someone the other day from HubSpot and they said, product market fit doesn't mean two two customers that have bought your product and hey, we have figured this out. when I define product market fit, I'm looking at, okay, a subset of customers have not only bought your product, they're using it and you've retained them. And so then there's that there's that point, that drop, that inflection point where, okay, we now have a growing set of customers that not only are buying, but are also

staying with us. And so when you get to that part of the journey, it often requires a remodel. And the folks and the in the way that you were going to market to get those first customers is not necessarily what's going to get you to the next level. I call folks that are in that series A, I call them pirates. They're just out there, they're with the founder. They might be that founder led AE. They're literally trying to figure out what is going to stick, right?

And it often is not what they initially think. when I came to Alcatraz, they had already figured out was interested and who was buying our And so then I that what the GTM riddle, what excites me about that is then you have to take a look at it and you have to say, okay, what type of salesperson do I need? Are we an enterprise motion? Are we a mid-market motion? Are we a director? Are we channel?

do we need hunters and farmers or both? what use cases and personas and verticals should we focus on? What custom what sets of customers should we say no to? So when you look at all of that based on some of those first customers, you'll find that you're gonna have to make some changes. And it doesn't mean you just rip and replace, it means there's iterations and you're still testing. But I think

That is where I love to thrive, where you start to build what I would call truly for scale. I know that everybody likes to say, hey, scale. You know, everybody wants the But really thinking about how you're gonna build, because if you do it the wrong way, you're gonna build and attenuate out in a in a in a bad way, right? And so you wanna obviously get it right. But that's where I like to come in. I don't wanna go figure out if this product

is gonna gain traction in the market. And some people live for that, right? And if you do, then that's where you should go. But for me, it's sort of figuring out this riddle and how do

you get to the next five hundred customers or whatever set of AR, whatever your goal may be.

KK Anderson (04:14)

So

you touched on it a little bit, but if you don't mind, go a little bit deeper and walk us through the the pieces of this riddle or puzzle, like as you call it, as you see them today, and maybe even give us give us some glimpse into what you're thinking about as you're moving into to 2027 with your how you're gonna put the pieces of that riddle together for Alcatraz.

Rick Nee (04:34)

Well, I mean, first you have to start with what you think about your playbook and you think about what you know, what riddle you're trying to solve. There are there are real stakeholders with real goals that may not necessarily be the ones that you you're marching towards, but they are what they are, right? You have the board, you have investors, you have the CEO, you different different folks and stakeholders that are like, This is what we need to do.

So I think the lens that you immediately have to take as you're figuring out this riddle is what is the most efficient and effective way to get an ROI and to grow sales fast? And often that means reverse engineering the data, right? everyone talks about AI, but if you look at Claude and you pipe that into your HubSpot and you start to cue the different leading and lagging indicators.

You should be able form a pretty strong hypothesis of what you should and shouldn't do as you march down a path, which is an annual number. and and that let's face it, the average CRO lasts 14 or 16 months, depending on which data you're looking at in this as world. So I I would say if you're you're figuring out that riddle, it let's keep it simple, stupid. Let's look at

Eight to ten metrics and be clear-eyed on what we should make our immediate, what I'll call low-hanging fruit. And let's go get some quick wins as we're thinking about that remodel. Earn some trust. You can actually miss your first or second quarterly target if it's trending in the right direction with the plan, right? So I'm looking at okay, which verticals? Who do I have here that can actually

Stay with the company as we as we scale. Again, a series A pirate, a hunter, might not necessarily be the right fit for a series B. You're going to look at which use cases, the sales cycling, your win rate, your your deal size land versus expand. And then through all of that, you can start to put in place what I would call your vertical structure, which I know we're gonna talk a little bit about today, but I think

Most CROs that come into these roles at this point, I think what happens when they're trying to solve this riddle is is they see eight, ten, twelve, fourteen things that they could do and they try to do all of them when they should probably only be doing one or two of them and go get those wins and then go build out from there.

Mark (06:41)

Excellent. So Rick, most earlier stage CROs and are in a standard shape. They come in, there's a sales director of some sort, an SDR, customer success person. What do you what do you keep from that initial structure and shape? And where do you immediately give yourself permissions to kind of blow it up and start again?

Rick Nee (07:01)

So a few things. I love this question. And I would say 10 years ago I was probably at fault for what I'm gonna tell you say not to do. but I guess as you get older and you've been through this a few times, you you learn you learn from those mistakes and you and you try to do the right thing moving forward. And and for me, you see this a lot with job this you see this a lot with job roles, open CRO roles or VP of sales roles. It's like we're looking for someone with a playbook.

And it's like, okay, great. Well, the playbook for cyber company A or physical company B doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna take that playbook and it's gonna be a perfect overlay. And if anyone says that, I have a playbook and it will I can just turn this thing on, then you should run the other way. I think there's a lot that we've learned in the industry. I think there's more data.

There's more networking opportunities. There's podcasts like this where there's lots of nuggets and things that you can extract from, right? I was listening to one six months ago and a CRO had said, hey, you should really look at your webinars and doing them this way. And I thought, that's a great idea. I haven't haven't looked at that. So great. So that, you know, you you're gonna take some of those new things and add it. But I would say any playbook that you're gonna bring in and assume it's gonna work somewhere else. Let's say it's 50.

To 70% applicable, which means there's a pretty big could be 50%, it could be 30%, that you're gonna have to call audibles and and lean into what the business needs, right? so for us, vertical pod, everyone's gonna tell you, hey, you're gonna need a sales director, you're gonna need an SDR, you're gonna need success person, you're gonna need, you're gonna need this.

I think, yes, I think the I think the clarity of role is very important. But you know, for us, it's been SDR sales directors. we have our inside sales rep that look that is doing some of that success stuff and some of the renewal stuff. We have channel account managers that are doing a little bit of a a different role than you would see in other orgs where they're helping us drive lead generation, but not necessarily deals. and we've had to like lean in heavily. We have found through our data.

That service and support is super critical to retaining and expanding customers. Sounds obvious, but when you have an early Series B company and you have cash and you're making investments, the easy button is to say, I'm just gonna go hire more sales directors. I'm gonna go hire more SDRs. I'm go. And I think before you do that, you should understand your buyer journey and look at the complexity of what you're selling. And my last company, out of the box cloud cyber tool.

The post and pre-sale support on the technical side was not as great. And so the the answer was you should accelerate sales directors and SDRs. Here, we are selling a physical security solution that's very simple to deploy, but based on what our customer wants with that, and if they're doing an on-prem deployment or they're gonna they want us to be baked into their environment, those are a little bit more complex. And so we have found we need.

Just as many folks post-sale as we do pre-sale. again, that was not something from my playbook. So I think you have to look at the buyer journey. You have to look at what's working, where customers are happy, where things are sticky, and and go there. And and don't be afraid to question those that are overly dogmatic on hey, you need to be using these AI, these nine AI tools, and you need to have a person, a success team that's this big based on the series or revenue or.

Then you should I should always start with the well, why? What are they doing?

What are they not doing? What what is this role doing? And so I'm a big believer in giving folks enrolls multiple things to do, to stretch them where they might be doing renewals and mid market sales, or they might be doing success and post sale this or deployment and and pre-sales engineering, whatever. I just I think you have to look at what's right.

And the gift that keeps on giving there, Mark, is a lot of thought leaders in the in the go-to-market space will say, Well, you need this size team and you need to do this. And then I think the answer is, well, I have limited capital. So I have to I have to make the most efficient, effective investments here. And often that means a series B where

You're asking people to do multiple things. And then it's into a role that's not the traditional customer success role. It's not a traditional renewal specialist. They're doing multiple things. I think the more you grow up and you go to Series C, Series D, or IPO, then specialization probably becomes more and more relevant, right? but I think at B, you still want folks that are a bit of

generalists in some of the roles that they're doing so that you can get more from the team if that makes sense.

KK Anderson (11:21)

And you said pod. And I imagine as well in in your world, where I think it's probably becoming more normal and more accepted to have a facial recognition, security instead of just a badge. You know, everyone's just been carrying badges for a hundred years and we're used to swiping our badges, to get into every building and to do everything. but I imagine in that pod structure, then there's a super close relationship between

you know, your inside sales team and your C S that's in that pod and your AE and like what are we what feedback are we hearing from the market? Like what

Rick Nee (11:50)

Yeah.

KK Anderson (11:51)

objections are we getting? What obstacles are we facing? Like I bet that's

Rick Nee (11:54)

That's

yeah, I that that's exactly right. That's why I love the power of the vertical pod. It's it's really a feedback loop at at its core. That's

KK Anderson (12:04)

Right.

Rick Nee (12:04)

really what it is, because there is so much good information on a hundred person startup team. And I could guarantee you that fifty, sixty percent of that knowledge transfer doesn't happen because of the unintended silos that are built.

That was sort of my genesis into the vertical pod. Verticals, I believe, buy and have different cycles and and things of that nature. But really, KK it was to speed up the feedback loop. And an SDR. So I actually I have the SDR, the inside sales rep, and if we have a success person actually reporting to that sales director, and other

In other companies, they might have those reporting to the function leads. But what I'm actually trying to do is I'm trying to look at that customer journey from a new logo intro meeting to a large expansion opportunity. I'm trying to make sure that that knowledge transfer is happening all the time. And then they can adjust their discovery, they can adjust their new logo targeting, they can

make introductions or present new use cases to similar customers. That all

KK Anderson (13:06)

Right.

Rick Nee (13:07)

happens when you're doing the vertical I don't really get when when folks tell me, well I'm the I'm the enterprise rep and I'm the mid

KK Anderson (13:13)

Yeah.

Rick Nee (13:13)

market and I sell to everybody. Perhaps that does make sense to be fair. it probably does. I'm sure it does.

KK Anderson (13:19)

Not in your world. You know, a university looking for security is gonna be very different than in an airport, right? Wouldn't don't you

Rick Nee (13:26)

Right. Yeah.

yeah. And I have learned I have learned so much from our sales directors on that. But you're right, like a a higher ed higher ed population where, you know, everyone's carrying a mobile phone and the concept of a badge is sort of foreign to a lot of them. versus a data center where it might be two or three factor where every single room or row or wherever you're going in a data center.

you're doing multiple multiple authentications to get somewhere, those are very, very different.

problems or things you're trying to serve. as your sales director, imagine jumping from a higher ed one where he's worried about students losing badges all the time to a triple, triple three factor use case where it's government sensitive data, data and and the the team is just used to and has to do a certain set of workflow things just to get to their job. They're just very, very different.

KK Anderson (14:18)

Yeah, really interesting. And last thing I'll say before we move into the next topic around kind of reverse engineering that data is that I would say, Mark, and correct me if I'm wrong, but we're you know, we're so lucky we get to talk to CROs every day on this on this show. And almost all of them have been pivoting to a vertical

Rick Nee (14:37)

Yeah.

KK Anderson (14:37)

pod structure.

And I think it's because of the feedback loop, but it's also because of this trust recession that we're in and being able to be more human and be more differentiated and really get into subject matter expertise. Like it seems like it is the hottest topic over the last couple of months. Mark, do you agree?

Mark (14:53)

Yeah, I do agree. I I think it's been building longer than just the last few months. I think it's been really building over ten, twelve years. And I especially saw that in the software industry, especially enterprise software.

KK Anderson (15:06)

Mm-hmm.

Mark (15:07)

So yeah, but definitely there's a newfound momentum in that as well.

KK Anderson (15:11)

Yeah.

And I think maybe even just for a mid-sized series, A through is what I really what I'm referencing and and the verticalization, but I think it's the right call. Okay,

Rick Nee (15:20)

Yeah.

KK Anderson (15:21)

so let's go into reverse engineering data before you, change the model. And when we say model, we mean your go to market, you know, puzzle pieces or riddle, if you will. and

we chatted in the prep session and you've vindicated that, there's enough tools now. There's AR, there's AI, there's CRM, there's all kinds of data out there that you can reverse engineer and and form a strong hypothesis quickly. Like what is what does that actually look like for you? Like what data are you looking at? What are you reverse engineering? Like how are you using that to solve your riddle?

Rick Nee (15:52)

I first, like just a blanket statement. I'm always surprised, and I would bet this is for at least half of series A, maybe transition into series B, that no not many have taken a a a true look at the data in and really tried to form a hypothesis on it. Of course, everybody looks at the data to some degree, but there's there's a few caveats and one.

By time you inherit a CRM system, if you're coming into a series B, you have to question the integrity of it, first of all. Right. p field have been added, fields have been taken out, and now we have AI which could spit out all that data, and you know, a lot will tell you that data's dirty. and and it it just is. And so

KK Anderson (16:28)

Yeah.

Rick Nee (16:28)

you got that, and you have perhaps a few folks that are investors or board members that say, This is why we invested, and we believe.

Early that this was the type of customer in the DL size. And then the data says something different. So I I would encourage and I recommend to anyone that's coming into a a product market fit, how I defined it, where you know you get customers who are starting to buy starting to buy and starting to actually retain, before you really plug in all of the data to start looking at these different KPIs or leading or lagging indicators.

You have to clean it up. And so that sounds like a very, very painful task. And if and we're fortunate now, we have a RevOps leader that is helping with that. But the way I did it for the first six months here in the last two roles that I've had is export, look at export all the win-loss data on a spreadsheet, and then go get those outliers and get them out of the data. There's just weird things that

you don't know

or that have inflated or and go get to the median. Go get to go figure out what your sales cycle length really is. Go build your taxonomy of basic vertical structure. go do all of that. And the hypothesis is that I was able to form by doing a cursory or just a basic cleanup of the data. And then instruct your RevOps or your sales ops team to say, okay, now that I've cleaned X, Y, and Z.

Can we go make these fixes in our CRM so that moving forward, this is a little bit quicker? So I would always encourage people, you gotta you, you have to do some cleaning up. And if you're not willing to roll your sleeves up as a CRO at series A, series B to do that, then I don't I don't actually don't think you should be in the job because you know you come from a big company or series D or you know, yes, doing

a few hundred million in the R, all that sort of.

Done for you. But I think at the A and B level, you've got to roll your sleeves up. And then you have to look at the data. And there's a few data points where you look at them initially and you're like, you know what? It's the integrity is just not there. So that's still a hypothesis. But I can see the DL size. I can see which verticals are buying. I can see the sales cycle length now that I've removed outliers.

You know, yeah, what you know, if you have some sales cycle,

yeah, if you have sales cycle length, you have a hundred deals over five years that were all closed in a day, you're like, wait a minute, nobody, what's going on here? it was just somebody was rebuilding a quote, and so now it looks like it was the sales cycle. They finally put the right

KK Anderson (18:40)

They finally put it in C R because their manager said they

Rick Nee (18:44)

they finally put it in CRM. Exactly, right? So remove all of that stuff, right? So but sales cycle length, deal size, which verticals you're buying.

Pipeline coverage by pipeline coverage by vertical, by rep. you could start to look at all of that, number of new logos, the percentage of LAN versus expand, how quickly from LAN to expand. And through that, you start to see what I would say the the most important KPIs that you need, win rate, right? So we have a certain pipeline coverage number.

That is not as aggressive as what the industry says because of our win rate. And so again, after you clean the data. So once you have all that, the next level is then to say, okay, I see what the data is telling me, but now let's actually go a step further and let's look at what the vertical data is telling me.

KK Anderson (19:33)

Mm.

Rick Nee (19:34)

The vertical data will have different.

Performance. Some verticals are going to have very long sales cycles, but the deals are bigger. Some are much quicker, but the deal is smaller. some require a more technical resource that it in in these things that whatever. And so you start to look at that and you say, geez, I think I I think I needed

to hire this type of person and they need to focus on these verticals. But maybe these these verticals, I can tell you right now, the persona of my sellers are different based on the verticals they're in, what those verticals need. And so again, that's the power of the verticals, is that what I initially knew was a communication loop. And to Mark's point earlier, like this has been an eight, 10, 12 year vertical, people have been sort of banging on this door.

It started to catch my attention when publicly traded companies like Cloudflare and some others said, Hey, we're outperforming because we have the structure. So of course there is a there's a revenue piece, but the the piece that that I would say in the last year that's stuck with me with the verticals is not only the feedback loop and the outperforming in revenue, but actually

What is needed in those verticals based on what that vertical data is telling you? And I can I it some of them look the same, right? Or pretty close, but some of them are wildly different. And when you're thinking about near and far-term revenue targets, you need both. You need those bigger swings that are going to take longer, and you need to make certain investments and certain comp plans and certain types of people for those. And then you need someone else that can do what I call the run rate quicker business.

And that's a different set of folks and investments. And so that's that's what reverse engineering data means to me. I look at it every 30 days and every 90, and I encourage any revenue leader to do this. I take a Friday afternoon, probably six Starbucks iced coffees, and I just

KK Anderson (21:12)

Yeah.

Rick Nee (21:14)

I I I block my calendar for the day.

and I basically say to myself, okay, I'm a venture capital private equity investor. I'm gonna go deep into this. I'm gonna look at cohorts. I'm gonna look at verticals. I'm gonna look at time series trends. And okay, this is still looking what we thought, or this one's starting to get more interesting. So I think 30 look, 60 look, and then not every 90 year, and maybe at the six month mark.

You're really digging because that's when you're starting to think about 2027, right? You're starting to think of okay, I need to start thinking about my budget and my plan for next year. And I should have enough of a signal from six months to know where the puck is going to some degree. Of course, things change, but that's what I mean when I'm talking about reverse engineering the data. and I think you have to do it. I think you can work with your sales or rev ops leader, but I think you have to be in as the as the chief revenue officer.

KK Anderson (22:02)

Roll up your sleeves.

Rick Nee (22:03)

Yeah, you gotta roll

Mark (22:03)

Yeah.

Rick Nee (22:04)

it up and

And with Claude, which is my favorite AI tool, and again, they're all great. the prompts you can get very creative contextually with the prompts as you're sort of pressure testing your own bias or your own, you got the data, but you then you can kind of try to convince yourself based on the data that this is always right. But like, no, tell me where tell me where I'm not looking. What are the blind spots? What about this? And and you'll start to see other things willing.

start to uncover. And so it to me it's a fun exercise. If you like data, it doesn't happen often. Yeah. The aha

KK Anderson (22:31)

Mm. We love data. We love data here at AGS, that's for sure. Mm-hmm.

Rick Nee (22:35)

moments,

Mark (22:35)

Yeah.

Rick Nee (22:36)

they don't come often, but when they do, good or bad, you're like,

KK Anderson (22:39)

Yeah.

Rick Nee (22:39)

okay, that this is a very compelling thing that I need to have a discussion with the senior leadership team about.

KK Anderson (22:44)

And I'm sure your board appreciates

Mark (22:44)

Perfect.

KK Anderson (22:45)

that. Mm-hmm.

Rick Nee (22:46)

Yeah, definitely.

Mark (22:47)

So Rick, I think this is a good place for us to pause for episode one and move into episode two. The idea that a vertical can carry its own economics and that these economics are what earn you the next four people is worth sitting with a little bit longer.

KK Anderson (23:04)

So reading the data before you change the structure is just as I mentioned, the same discipline that we employ here at AGS, and specifically inside our two millimeter club, which is a small group coaching residency of sales managers, leaders from non-competitive companies that come together in a data-driven coaching program where they learn to identify using data.

And coach the small shifts in seller behavior that add up to exponential movement and pipeline. We have eight-week cohorts that launch monthly. If you're interested, you can apply at www.get-ags.com forward slash two millimeter club, two mm club.

In part two, Rick takes us into the talent side of his go-to-market riddle, how he turns sales directors into industry voices, why he promotes from SDR seat instead of hiring senior talent in, and what a 90% retention rate actually takes to hold.

Mark (24:04)

That is part two. We will see you there.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

General Episode Description:

In Part 2 of Selling Intelligence, Thurman Sneed, Chief Revenue Officer at Marigold, returns to show how the same “do the math” mindset can transform everything from account coverage and customer conversations to seller development and AI adoption. Thurman explains why Marigold moved from a round robin model to vertical specialization, how CSMs and SDRs can grow into revenue generating roles, and why a tighter ICP helps teams focus their resources where they can create the most impact.

The conversation also explores how sellers can use customer data and benchmark insights to build stronger business cases and quantify value for executives. Thurman shares how his team is applying AI to sales coaching, account preparation, pipeline generation, and churn prediction, while keeping human judgment at the center. The goal is not AI for the sake of AI. It is using technology where it can genuinely improve speed, capacity, decision making, and revenue outcomes.

What You’ll Learn:

• Vertical Specialization: Why moving away from round robin account assignment can help sellers develop deeper industry expertise and become trusted advisors.
• Turning CSM Knowledge into Revenue: How customer success teams can use their existing customer knowledge and relationships to identify expansion opportunities.
• Building the Next Generation of Sellers: Why giving SDRs opportunities to own and close smaller deals can accelerate their development and create stronger career paths.
• Getting Serious About ICP: How focusing on the right markets and customers can improve efficiency across sales, marketing, and customer success.
• Selling with Customer Math: How benchmark data and ROI calculations can help sellers turn value propositions into compelling executive business cases.
• AI That Earns Its Place: How AI can improve sales preparation, coaching, research, pipeline generation, and decision making without removing human judgment.
• Using AI to Predict Churn: Why clean, accessible data is critical for identifying customer risk before it becomes a lost account.

Key Topics:

• Vertical sales specialization
• Ideal customer profile strategy
• SDR development and career progression
• Customer success expansion opportunities
• ROI based selling
• Benchmark data in sales conversations
• Executive level value selling
• AI enabled sales coaching
• Sales productivity and capacity
• AI and revenue team efficiency
• Churn prediction and customer retention
• Human judgment in AI driven sales

Guest Spotlight: Thurman Sneed

Thurman Sneed is the Chief Revenue Officer at Marigold, where he leads sales, customer success, revenue operations, and marketing. With a career that began in accounting and auditing before expanding into operations and revenue leadership, Thurman brings a distinctive financial and operational perspective to the CRO role. His leadership philosophy centers on disciplined execution, data driven decision making, cross-functional alignment, and helping teams turn ambitious revenue goals into practical, achievable actions.

Resources & Mentions:

• Marigold
• Vertical coverage models
• Ideal Customer Profile strategy
• ROI calculators and benchmark data
• AI enabled sales coaching
• Churn prediction
• The Two Millimeter Club by AGS

🎧 Listen now and follow Selling Intelligence for more GTM insights from leading voices in sales, revenue, and business growth. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Mark (00:38)

Welcome back to Selling Intelligence. If you're just joining in, you're in the right place. And if you come straight from part one, we picked up where we left off.

KK Anderson (00:48)

In part one, Thurman Sneed made three things clear. He came into the revenue seat through accounting and operations rather than through a quota. And that lens is why he thinks in arithmetic. He discovered that the individual level math he assumed his managers were doing with sellers was not actually happening. And he treats every function inside the company as a customer, which is what makes the outside selling work.

Mark (01:14)

So in part two we get practical. Thurman rebuilt the coverage model, taught people who have never carried a quota to carry one, pointed the same math at his customers, and now deciding where AI belongs in all of this. Thurman, welcome back. Let us pick up right here.

Thurman (01:33)

Thank you, Mark.

Mark (01:34)

So Thurman,

Rebuilding the coverage model. So Thurman, you inherited a model where accounts were assigned round robin and reps were specialized by platform. What was the first change you made and why that one first?

Thurman (01:48)

Yeah, the first thing that we did is we decided that we were going to have a vertical coverage model as opposed to round robin. And I made that first because I wanted fo I wanted our sales team to learn the customer, to, to learn the terminology, to be very specific, and to enjoy, what they were doing every day, as opposed to today I wake up and I'm gonna be serving.

this industry, the next day, I get a hospital, the next day I get an amusement park. It didn't seem fair, just from a basic level, so why not assign to a vertical and become specialist in that space?

KK Anderson (02:23)

So and in doing that allows them to almost brand their expertise and be thought of as trusted advisors and being able to solve the business problems that your customers are out there facing.

Thurman (02:35)

Yes, truly to be able to solve it in a in a very meaningful way because they understand how they drive their outcome. So back to doing the math, how do they actually need to produce their pipeline, their conversions, their sales, whatever that might be, even if it's a not for profit, how do they need to drive more donations? if it's a government entity, what are they trying to produce as an outcome as opposed to it being so different in every conversation?

KK Anderson (03:03)

Right. And your your product at Marigold is you know, they're they're looking for they're using Marigold because they want to drive business and communications and conversions and so that's that's really important. Mm-hmm.

Thurman (03:18)

With specific

audiences. And it's not always the same way that you drive that content

KK Anderson (03:23)

Right. And

Thurman (03:24)

to those audiences.

KK Anderson (03:25)

it's definitely a way to create differentiation, When you can help with their problems. So you gave people who had been processing renewals for years a quota. So they're not used to a quota. It's kind of like handing the finance guy a quota, like you got,

Thurman (03:39)

This is that.

KK Anderson (03:39)

and you told them, you know, you're gonna train them and tell them to take advantage of of what they did not realize they already knew. And so

Like what what did that teaching look like week to week? We have so many, we have so many customers. I've seen it a hundred times, where all of a sudden a CSM turns into a, quota carrying member of the sales team. So tell us how you did it.

Thurman (04:00)

Well, one of the first things is to inject confidence in what they already knew. They have been involved in so many customer conversations. So many times a customer has has actually explained to them the pain that they are actually that they endure. And I love it when it's a case of when we bring on a new customer and that CSM is onboarding them and they're connecting with the challenge that they were having elsewhere.

Right. So they have learned that or they were learning that over the years, but not necessarily turning that lens and looking at it from a different angle. What if I took these customers that I have made happy and asked them to introduce me to another department at a university? Or is literally leveraging the relationships that they had built with their customer set? Right.

And so the training became more of let's inject the confidence because you know the platform better than some of our brand new sellers right now. You actually live in the platform. You've lived the customer experience. You've gone through the benchmark conversations and the performance conversations with a customer. Change that lens to someone that is reaching out that has not experienced that yet.

Mark (05:12)

Yeah, and I love how, Thurman, you're taking this more into the prescripted side. So let's go even a little further. you moved your SDRs from setting meetings to owning and closing the smaller deals themselves. What does that do for a seller's development, particularly an early stage seller, that handing off the meeting could never do?

Thurman (05:34)

Yeah, and we didn't move them holistically, but what I wanted to do was to ensure that our SDR team had a career path and that they understood that career path very early versus late. Right. And so ultimately that close closing of the deal is what we all think of, that's the account executive, But if we could help them get a little feel for why am I passing off this customer that I can go ahead and assist now?

I understand why why do I need to set up a meeting and make them wait a few days or a period of time when I can go ahead and service service them? And that's what an AE needs to do, If I can solve that pain, I can hear that pain, I'm hearing the challenges. Let's just go ahead and close the deal. and when they get ready and they're further into their career, a year, 18 months into their career, and they're ready to go to

That transition is so much faster. But at the same time, what it allows is it allows me to know who really does not want to do sales. Right. And do you want to be an SDR for from a career perspective? That's also okay. Do you want to transition and become a CSM one day? That's also okay. Right. But it allows those that are in this position that we traditionally think of as our bench for sales.

to be able to make that career decision very early.

KK Anderson (06:54)

So y you put it you in one of your th your therminisms, In the in our prep video was we started talking. you put it as eighty twenty, stop fishing in oceans, fish in lakes and ponds, do the math. No, how do you pick which lakes?

Thurman (07:08)

With to to be maniacal about the true ICP. we

KK Anderson (07:12)

Love that.

Thurman (07:12)

and again, there's it's easier coming out of my mouth than it sometimes is, but it's actually possible. Especially, you know, you go into a situation, it's like, wow, we're marketing to such a large audience. How can we make sure that a smaller audience actually hears us, though? And is that

When you do the math, is that gonna have more ROI and efficiency than trying to be so wide? And every single time it does. And so I used this literally the other day and I had to explain it, but I said, I'm fishing for wells and ponds. I know that that doesn't sound right, but I think everybody understands what I'm trying to say. I'm gonna focus on this vertical and I am going to go after fewer, right?

wells in that pond because I'm so focused and I know that we can serve them, When you fish in too big of an ocean, you're trying to sell sell to everyone, you're not helping your marketing team, you're not helping your sales team and helping them get educated, on a space that we can work. You're not you're not helping those SDRs. Everybody's kind of everywhere and not knowing how to really hit the outcome.

KK Anderson (08:18)

I love it. We had a guest recently on our podcast and his his saying was you can't teach a fish to climb a tree.

Thurman (08:26)

I like that. I might have to have it to reuse that one.

KK Anderson (08:28)

We're gonna have to have some outtakes. Outtakes of all the the fun analogies that we get on the show.

Mark (08:29)

Yeah.

Thurman (08:34)

Yeah.

Mark (08:34)

All right, so let's to our next topic here. so you've taught your team how to do the math from a sales perspective. Let's go into a little bit of doing the math for and with the customer. So your company has years of benchmark data sitting inside a platform that nobody was using in a sales conversation. What changed the first time?

a seller put it in front of a customer and how has it evolved from there?

Thurman (09:03)

Yeah, this this is probably one of the most fun things because this this ties into the teaching. It's and it also ties into the cross-functional are CSMs using this with customers. This is where you are. But guys, wait a minute. Salespeople, about this on the front end? That's exactly what your prospects are trying to achieve. So the first time this happened, a rep put together their own ROI calculator.

And they said it to the customer that was apprehensive about going ahead and signing a deal. And they needed to be able to show this to their board member to get approval. That was the that was the very first time. And then the next thing you know, is like we have a signed deal in two days. It was just it's awesome to see because I wasn't involved in it. It was the teaching starting to take place. I have this information that you actually don't have. This is how you compare to others and how.

Our software, our recommended change in process is gonna help you achieve these numbers.

KK Anderson (09:58)

You told us about one one of your sellers walked a CEO through what a cheaper alternative would have cost him in emails. You know, Marigold is an email communication platform.

Thurman (10:07)

Yes.

KK Anderson (10:09)

and like what it would cost him in emails that never reach an inbox. And you know, he

Thurman (10:14)

so

KK Anderson (10:14)

came back and signed the next day. Tell tell us a little bit about that story.

Thurman (10:17)

Yeah, this

one had to do with deliverability. And we know that you know some platforms don't have as high deliverability rates as others. and the rep explained, hey, you can go with that option, but let me just give you one metric, deliverability, right? And if you do the math on that deliverability, you may have forty thousand fewer emails hitting the inbox. How would that if you go through your math and your conversion, how

KK Anderson (10:40)

Yep.

Thurman (10:41)

would that translate into the lower tiers? And it became

the light bulb moment for the CEO when he signed the next day. So

KK Anderson (10:49)

Right.

Thurman (10:50)

just awesome.

Mark (10:50)

Love it.

KK Anderson (10:51)

And it's ironic

Mark (10:51)

So

KK Anderson (10:52)

too, 'cause it's all part of the conversion math for a seller, right? How many

Thurman (10:56)

Yes.

KK Anderson (10:57)

emails do you have to send to get these conversions to get the get the conversation? So yeah, cool.

Mark (11:02)

So Thurm Thurman,

Thurman (11:03)

Exact same.

Mark (11:04)

yep, what what about what has to be true about a seller before you really can trust them to make a numbers argument in front of an an executive?

Thurman (11:13)

But they get the numbers for themselves.

KK Anderson (11:17)

That's so good.

Thurman (11:19)

Yes. and that's why I wanna make sure that they get the numbers for themselves. If they can do the math for themselves, they can do the math for any customer.

KK Anderson (11:26)

Right. So, for our CRO audience out there, you know, most most of most companies, most BDB companies are probably sitting on all kinds of data that they have not ever thought about being able to quantify and turn into an ROI, or selling argument. would you agree with that? Like I just like kind of what comes to mind as I as I say that, do you think that's

Thurman (11:47)

When I go back through the history of the many companies that I've worked for, I

KK Anderson (11:50)

Mm-hmm.

Thurman (11:51)

absolutely agree with that. And it it goes back to and I this happens unnaturally or naturally, I guess you would say, that folks end up in silos and you just don't know. And it's just if you don't end up in environments where you're sharing and speaking and finding out, I didn't know that you had that. It could really be as simple as that. I did not know that we had that.

KK Anderson (12:13)

Right. And so like what would you where would you go looking? Like finance

Thurman (12:17)

The first

KK Anderson (12:17)

products, like where would you if you are listening to this and you're like, huh, I wonder what we have.

Thurman (12:22)

I would first go to product

KK Anderson (12:24)

Yeah.

Thurman (12:25)

and I would and I would start to understand what does what are the metrics that the product team has that we may not be aware that's in XYZ platform. Right. And can I use some of that information that's being collected in order to tell a story at the end of the day? That's what we're doing, right? To tell a story. Because

They don't the engineers don't always know the story that you're trying to express to a customer.

But that's where I would start first.

Mark (12:54)

All right, so our next topic here and final topic for this time with Thurman is the concept of AI where it earns its place. So not AI for the sake of AI or not AI. I mean it's gotta earn the right to be used. And KK and I know this space well. We've worked really hard to build metric models.

where you really can can build upon a focus of AI to ROI. And with those models, with the the work we do with our clients, we make sure we analyze where we're going to get the most bang for our buck for our clients. And we analyze and we know exactly how it's impacted it when it's when it's done. So with your team, you know, they watched you, I'm sure.

Teaching and coaching and they I'm sure loved it. but then you went a step further and you built a sales coach out of your own material. What did people start doing with that tool that you never really expect?

Thurman (14:00)

Yeah. Well, first and foremost, they were wild and it didn't take a long time for them to start using it. But what the first thing that they started doing with it is preparing. and the second thing that they actually started doing with it was evaluating what they had previously done on an opportunity or evaluating an opportunity and what they could do next. Now being able to see what what they said or heard in a gone call.

what notes that were documented in Salesforce. All all these different connections that they were able to pull together in a matter of seconds, just not realizing, right?

KK Anderson (14:35)

So you know, what's interesting about AI is that a lot of this a lot of these things could have been done before AI, but they weren't. And a lot of times it's because it just it would take so long. you talked you talked about that in our in our prep call, and I thought it was was really interesting. So what like in your opinion?

What does AI actually change for a salesperson?

Mark (14:57)

Yeah.

Thurman (14:58)

But it allows them to be quicker, to do things and and save time and to have an imagination in some particular cases, Because if I now I can go and put in an ask a question and when you're surprised, my God, now what else can I ask? And get some guidance. And it's

I don't want it, I don't ever want to take the human out then from our perspective, both from our product perspective as well as our sales perspective, is not to take what the AI output is and say, I don't need to filter it. It is now I can use my critical thinking skills all the time, And to focus on what is what is that result, what is it guiding me to do, but does that make sense is where I want them spending the time.

Right. Let me build a model, something that I can reuse. Let me help prepare and understand what is happening at this particular company because all that data is out there. But before, who really wanted to spend the time researching every single prospect realistically that they were engaging with if they had to hit numbers that we were talking about, the math.

KK Anderson (16:04)

Right.

Thurman (16:04)

So the math became easier, faster.

Because I can take this, I can read it, my God, I know how to apply it. Let's go. Right. So

KK Anderson (16:13)

Spot on. Yeah. And it's I mean, gone are the days where we would, you know, be searching for something on the internet, have to copy and paste it and put it in a document and compile all of your research and then read through it all and try and draft and come up with some differentiating statements and then decide which ones to use. And I mean it would be a two hour process. Right? Yeah, exactly. And now

Thurman (16:33)

Yes. Per. Yeah.

KK Anderson (16:37)

now

You can do it in a split second and then you can ask it to you can it can help you be critical in your analysis of it to identify what's most important

Thurman (16:46)

Yeah.

KK Anderson (16:47)

what what's the most important problem that customer is trying to solve. Really good. so go yeah, go ahead, Mark.

Mark (16:51)

So Thurman,

yeah. So okay. So one of the things we wanted to make sure we learned from you as well that you have four SDRs presently, and my understanding you have no plan to add a fifth because of some of the things you're building with AI. how do you think about headcount once capacity stops being a function of people?

Thurman (17:15)

That is a very good question, Mark. and the reason why I kind of gave you guys that input is for two reasons. One, you asked a question in episode one about I think it was episode one that came in, about us going through the SDR and teaching them to close deals. So that if that capacity relates first and foremost to that particular piece, right? This pit particular position.

Is the one that is at the cusp of being able to help an AE be more effective, build more pipeline, build more meetings. We all know that that is the math. We need more meetings, But at the same time, this same position is the one that is allowing me to have more sales reps in reality, Because the more that they can take on the low end, the more my AEs can deal with the higher end. And you guys do the math. The more time.

the more deals on the higher end, right? With the same win rates, I'm gonna make more money at the end of the day, So that that's that's what's happening for me with the AI. Everybody's gonna become more efficient. This SDR role is is the cusp of the beginning of the math.

KK Anderson (18:21)

It really is. It's such an exciting time. you know, we've had guests on who have who have said that the S Dr role is coming to an end, and I totally It's it is just changing shape, right? The

Thurman (18:30)

it's not. It's changing shape.

Mark (18:33)

Yeah.

KK Anderson (18:34)

the ability for them to be a differentiator and you know

It's just it's changing shape and I think it's gonna be it's gonna be really exciting to see where AI can take that. So now you're looking at AI to predict churn better than than some of the tools you bought to do exactly that. what what has to be true about your data, before that works?

Thurman (18:55)

Well, as in any project, almost regardless of what it is, we got to make sure that the data is actually clean. but but the second most important part about the data is that we're it's accessible. and when I say accessible, if we wanna see the actions that someone takes in the platform or the actions that someone is taking in the market outside of us.

Right, being able to see that someone is looking at a competitor in advance as an example, right? Is that accessible information to us? If it's accessible, can we use it? Can we apply that almost to what they're doing on the on the other people's websites to what they're doing in the platform and put a formula together to say, these two things are related and it's gonna result in turn. Now we can insert the human back into.

the situation and say, let me make a phone call. Let me find out what may be going on before they ever know. Before we ever get a sense that they are considering alternatives.

Mark (19:55)

Beautiful. Well, Thurman, let's go on to our rapid fire part of our segment, and it's five questions, same five every episode. And let let me set you up with your first one. What was the first product or service you ever sold?

Thurman (20:11)

See when talk about this before, but it was Quizno Sandwiches.

KK Anderson (20:14)

Aha

Mark (20:15)

Nice, okay.

KK Anderson (20:17)

Okay, Thurman, who is your favorite CRO or CEO that you follow?

Thurman (20:22)

My f ooh, that's well, that's really tough. I'm gonna say my current, Lisa Mayer is my favorite CEO.

KK Anderson (20:29)

There you go, getting brownie points.

Thurman (20:31)

Yeah.

Mark (20:32)

So a leadership or go to market practice you believe every sales and marketing leader should adopt.

Thurman (20:38)

Leading by example, servant leadership.

KK Anderson (20:40)

I love it. Now for my favorite question, Thurman. Advice you would give your twenty one year old self.

Thurman (20:46)

Determine what you're going to own. In my particular case, I would tell people, invest in real estate as soon as you possibly can.

KK Anderson (20:53)

Ha ha ha ha ha.

Mark (20:54)

Excellent. Okay. So Thurman, this has been absolutely terrific. Where should people go to follow you and follow what you're working on?

Thurman (21:04)

I would say first go to LinkedIn. I have found myself loving to post. So I try to post at least once a week about a therminism, but I'm actually it's kind of fun because I'm bringing people along in my journey. I've been CRO for about eight or nine months now and I'm sharing some of those and it's been pretty fun.

KK Anderson (21:22)

Well, if you take one thing out of this conversation, take this. Nobody on your sales team is going to believe a number you have not sat down and show them. So do the math. It's a magical, very simple, way to think about it. and actually everything Thurman walked us through today comes back to, you know, managers sitting down with their sellers and managers coaching their sellers and walking them through the journey and the pathway on how to get.

things done. And that's exactly what we do inside the two millimeter club, which is an AGS program. It's a small group data-driven coaching program for frontline sit sales managers. You're in a room with up to eight sales managers from non-competitive companies. They will learn to identify and coach the small shifts in seller behavior that add up to exponential movement and pipeline. They're

Six months the cohort the whole program is six months, but you can break it down into two month sections and they launch monthly. If you're interested, come look at get ags dot excuse me, get dashags.com forward slash two mm club. That's wwget ags dot com.

Thurman, thank you so much for joining us today. and we look forward to having you again sometime on Selling Intelligence.

Thurman (22:44)

Thank you, KK. Thank you, Mark. I enjoyed it.

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General Episode Description:

In this episode of Selling Intelligence, Thurman Sneed, Chief Revenue Officer at Marigold, joins Mark Petruzzi and KK Anderson to unpack a simple but often overlooked discipline in revenue leadership: do the math. Drawing from his background in finance, operations, and revenue leadership, Thurman explains how sellers can turn an intimidating quota into a practical action plan by understanding their pipeline, win rates, gaps, and the time they have left to close them.

The conversation also explores how Thurman’s finance background shapes the way he approaches forecasting, pipeline quality, and cross-functional leadership. He shares why revenue teams need a single source of truth, how leaders can eliminate bloated pipeline, and why sales, marketing, customer success, and RevOps perform better when they understand each other’s goals and operate as one connected revenue organization.

What You’ll Learn:

• Do the Math: How to break quota goals into pipeline requirements, win rates, and achievable daily actions.
• Pipeline Gap Planning: How sellers can use existing pipeline, marketing, SDRs, and customer success relationships to build a realistic path to quota.
• The Value of Time: Why starting pipeline generation early gives sellers more ways to close the gap and avoid end-of-year pressure.
• Forecasting with a Finance Mindset: How financial discipline helps leaders identify inflated pipeline and focus on opportunities that are actually real.
• One Source of Truth: Why shared data and reporting create better conversations across sales, marketing, finance, and operations.
• Breaking Revenue Silos: How understanding the goals of adjacent teams can improve selling, customer handoffs, retention, and overall revenue performance.

Key Topics:

• Pipeline math and quota attainment
• Individual seller forecasting
• Win rates and pipeline coverage
• Pipeline quality and deal qualification
• Revenue forecasting
• Finance driven revenue leadership
• Sales accountability and coaching
• Cross-functional revenue alignment
• Sales, marketing, and customer success collaboration
• Breaking organizational silos
• Single source of truth for revenue teams

Guest Spotlight: Thurman Sneed

Thurman Sneed is the Chief Revenue Officer at Marigold, where he leads sales, customer success, revenue operations, and marketing. With a career that began in accounting and auditing before expanding into operations and revenue leadership, Thurman brings a distinctive financial and operational perspective to the CRO role. His leadership philosophy centers on disciplined execution, data driven decision making, cross-functional alignment, and helping teams turn ambitious revenue goals into practical, achievable actions.

Resources & Mentions:

• Marigold
• Pipeline management and forecasting
• Revenue Operations
• Cross-functional revenue alignment
• The Two Millimeter Club by AGS

🎧 Listen now and follow Selling Intelligence for more GTM insights from leading voices in sales, revenue, and business growth. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Mark (00:30)

Welcome to Selling Intelligence. I am Mark Petruzzi here as always with KK Anderson. Today we are talking about a phrase that most revenue leaders say and almost nobody actually does.

KK Anderson (00:43)

Do the math. Our guest uses it with his team constantly, and the first time you hear it, you might think it sounds a little cold, but it's quite the opposite. He uses it to take a seller who is convinced they are going to miss and show them on paper why they are not and how they can close the gap.

Mark (01:02)

So Thurman Sneed is the chief revenue officer at Marigold. He started his career as an auditor at Arthur Anderson, spent years running go-to-market operations. He has sat in the chief operating officer seat, and now leads revenue. Thurman, welcome to the show.

Thurman (01:20)

Thank you, Mark. Glad to be here.

Mark (01:22)

Welcome to Selling Intelligence. I am Mark Petruzzi with KK Anderson and this is the show for revenue leaders who would rather diagnose than guess.

KK Anderson (01:32)

Here's the thing that got our attention. Our guest spent years in operations assuming that sales managers underneath him were sitting down with individual sellers and walking them through their numbers. Then he took the revenue seat and found out that they were not. Not the team level math, the individual level math.

Mark (01:49)

Thurman Sneed, aka the Thurminator, I've heard that recently, is the chief revenue officer at Marigo, where he owns sales, customer success, revenue operations, and marketing. He came up through accounting and operations rather than through a quota, which makes him a rare profile in this seat and a very powerful one. Thurman, thanks for being here.

Thurman (02:14)

Thank you, Mark, for having me. I'm excited.

Mark (02:16)

So you have a phrase your team hears from you constantly. Do the math. Take us inside the first time you sat down with a rep and actually did it. What went on that that page?

Thurman (02:28)

Well, the first thing that went on that page was a little bit of a challenge in asking what is your current pipeline? And you might think that the person would reel that off just really quickly, but it wasn't that quick. So the but that was the first part of the math. What is your current pipeline? Okay. So once we get to that number, I ask a second question. What is your win rate? Your personal win rate.

On top of what is the win rate for that vertical, that industry? What what have others experienced potentially? Especially in the c in this particular case, it was a new rep. And I wanted to make sure that this individual knew the history of this particular vertical. And so we went on a journey for every step. That win rate, I let

The individual rep picked what they wanted to use versus the historical because they were more conservative than the historical. The second piece of that was all right, there's a gap there once you exhaust your existing pipeline. Let's take that gap, apply that same win rate the opposite way, right? And that's that's how much pipeline you need to be able to see that has the potential to close in the in the rest of the year.

So you can think about that and say, I like to think of things in a very similar way that I do in real estate because I love investing in real estate. But how many different ways can you close that gap now with 11 months left? Way one, marketing didn't turn off. So you're going to continue to get some business from marketing inbound leads. Number two, you have an SDR that's assigned to work with you.

What are you two going to work together to go get from two perspectives? One from a new division or cross-selling type of perspective, and one from a new logo in your territory perspective. But how are you going to map that out and drive the amount of pipeline that you want to see and close, still applying that same win rate to it? And then the last piece I wanted them to understand.

Is don't forget that there's a CSM in the organization or CSMs, it could be plural, that are also working in your same vertical. Have you had a conversation with them? Have you become friends? Are you all working as a team to realize that part of you closing your number is actually them introducing you to people that they know, giving you referrals?

And so by the time we finished that conversation, someone that was thinking, my God, how in the world am I going to hit my quota? It had been put into more digestible chunks and an action plan that they could go and take and say, most importantly, if I start this today versus starting this six months from now, I'm going to blow my quota out. Right. And that's what I

KK Anderson (05:12)

I love it.

Thurman (05:13)

want this individual to leave the table with.

KK Anderson (05:15)

I love it. And you if you've got someone's average deal size, you've got their win rate, you've got, their quota, you can so easily back into the number of activities that they need to generate to be able to, you know, and then have your conversion rates every step of way. You need to make this many phone calls and this many people, this percent will answer, this percent won't. The ones that answer, this percent will be a qualified, this percent won't.

For the ones that are qualified, and it just goes trickles trickles down. But to the point where that every single day, well, I mean, like for me, for example, if I don't have at least 10 calls that are related to a an op a business opportunity on my calendar, there's a big problem. Right.

Thurman (05:58)

Yes.

KK Anderson (05:59)

And so, and I know that I need to reach out to, you know, a hundred people a week.

And if I do that, then then I'm gonna be able to feed, feed that, feed that pipeline. And so, and you mentioned a new rep, and the new rep has a lot of resources behind them, like you said, through SDR and CSM and getting referrals. Tell me about how you apply this for like your your long-standing reps who aren't who maybe they know what they need to be doing, but they're not doing it.

Thurman (06:25)

It's exactly the same math, believe it or not. And the and the thing is the beauty of it being a new rep is that the new rep gets to start it from the beginning of their journey. For a rep that has been doing it, they might have picked up the habits of not doing the math and sitting down, not just at the beginning of a fiscal year, but all the time. Because once that becomes a consistent thing, they will never find themselves without pipeline. But we all know.

We find we find reps that end up in a situation where they don't have pipeline and it's because they stopped doing the math.

KK Anderson (06:57)

That's right.

Mark (06:58)

So Thurman, you put time into the equation as well, not just the overall pipeline. So what does a seller understand differently once they see what eleven months buys them compared to ten months compared to less than that?

Thurman (07:15)

Yeah, so what a what a rep is gonna see is that they're gonna run out of time if they don't start today. if you

Mark (07:20)

Mm-hmm.

Thurman (07:20)

if you if you and it goes it could actually apply to anything in our lives, and that's that's really the way that I try to bring it home. Most of us have something personal that we want to try to take care of in a certain period of time, and it's it makes the conversation easier.

When you can apply it back to the business perspective too. Right? So you can only get so far if you run out of time. You some at some point in time, the end of that quota year happens. And I can do, I can do nothing about it. Whether that is going to my marketing team and saying, hey, can we make a correction? Whether that is going to my CSM and saying, Hey, can you introduce me to this person today versus three months from now?

Every every bit of that time makes a difference.

KK Anderson (08:08)

So every CRO listening right now, Thurman, I could almost guarantee it has a seller on their team who is qu probably quietly certain they are they're gonna miss their number. They're not gonna they're not gonna hit it. What are what are if you are that CRO and you have a seller in that position, like what's the first thing you're gonna do with them? The first three numbers you're gonna put in front.

Thurman (08:31)

Well the first the first numbers that I'm gonna put in front of them is

Did you what did you do last year? Or what did you do last period? And try to get to the point of understanding how did that occur? Did that occur through volume? Did that occur through some anomaly? Because again, back to if you're if you didn't do the preparation before, you only can drive so much in a certain period of time. So do you need to go produce an anomaly?

for whatever that anomaly might be in your size of business, or do you need to go after volume? and those those can be those can result in different actions. So the first thing is what is the gap? How can I actually close that gap? Can I close that gap with three or do I need 20 types of things to

KK Anderson (09:15)

And then you put them on some kind of a tighter accountability cadence with you?

Thurman (09:19)

Tighter,

tighter account yes, tighter accountability with the management team, tighter accountability with marketing,

KK Anderson (09:25)

Mm-hmm.

Thurman (09:26)

to go and close that gap in a meaningful way. Everything needs to come down to the point that it's achievable. Not not something that is a pipe dream, so to speak. It needs to be written down in a way that the rep believes that their counterparts believe when I say counterparts, their teammates believe that it can be achieved.

KK Anderson (09:45)

Mm-hmm.

Mark (09:45)

All right. Well, let's, Thurman, let's take you back to your your journey from the finance seat to the revenue seat. you started your career as an auditor and an accountant, and somewhere along the way, I would imagine that somebody, CIO or someone else, tapped you on the shoulder and told you to go lead a CRM project. And I do know that you've you got into the first C.

CRM project and you said you had some really big takeaways, especially from your finance perspective to begin with. What did what did you see by working with the sales team for the first time in your career?

Thurman (10:25)

Well, working with I realized I worked with fine, I mean with the sales team from the jump, really. so when I left Arthur Anderson and I got into my first role, I didn't think of it that way. I was still in fine finance and including the opportunity that you're alluding to, I was still squarely in finance. but I was in a cross functional type of finance role. I was to help them do their pipeline management.

I was to help them do their forecasting, even revenue recognition off the deals that they booked. And so because of that, I just I developed a a different type of relationship than a lot of people developed, mainly because of the setup of that type of organization and how we were in the middle and the glue between the sales team and the rest of the organization.

KK Anderson (11:12)

So for years you were the right hand to a series of CEROs doing doing the work they were uncomfortable right? Going to finance, going to marketing, building the report. So what what does a revenue leader gain when they stop hand handing those conversations to somebody else?

Thurman (11:30)

To me, you gain respect and the ability to have conversations when in a non-threatening type of way. I think a lot of times when a CRO would go to a finance person, it becomes a you better do this, or I need you to do this, or that type of thing. And having that finance background, I could understand why finance might say no. And then I could return that back around into.

why finance would say yes. And I could only do that because of that, that finance background that I had. And I because I knew what they were trying to protect the company from or what have you. Same thing from an operational perspective is when we when we would develop reports and things along those lines, I wanted to avoid people coming into a room and saying your report is wrong. Or those are not the numbers that I see.

And so because I was in that again, finance operational type of lens all the time, we I want to remove those types of barriers. Here's our single source of truth. We're all going to come to the meeting and we're going to use the same report. And at first, that is extremely uncomfortable for people to do. One, because they want to speak from their report and their lens. And another is that's not gonna necessarily show me in the greatest light, right?

But when once

KK Anderson (12:46)

Yeah.

Thurman (12:47)

you start to operate as a team and you pull the thread all the way through, and everybody understands, what, we have the same goal. At the end of the day, we're all trying to drive the same success. We might as well use this same report and be able to see how marketing is doing, how sales is doing, et cetera. because that's the best way for us to change them.

Mark (13:06)

So Thurman, what does someone trained in finance see in a pipeline that a leader who came up carrying a number just looks at differently and reads differently as well?

Thurman (13:17)

Yeah, so for me, and I was I was probably being able to cut through the anomalies a lot faster. being able to decipher what is real versus in bloated or inflated. We all have been there, We've seen pipelines like that. We go to new companies and we say, what is the first thing that a CR does? let me let me get out the bloated pipeline. Let me kill kill all of those deals that are never gonna happen. From a finance perspective,

I can do that quicker. sometimes you might end up in situations where you don't actually have the ability to have the sales teams take it out, Meaning that you have to live with the bloated pipeline and you have to act like you don't see that is there. But now in this role, I can just say, you know what, just let's kill those deals. I always wanna just see what is the real quality pipeline that we are working so that we can be honest and truthful. And again,

identify what you were alluding to earlier, what is our real gap that we are tr solving for?

KK Anderson (14:13)

Do you feel like your numbers and your your forecast is more accurate because of that background?

Thurman (14:17)

my y absolutely it is.

KK Anderson (14:19)

Yeah.

You you should like you should do like a master class, Thurman, for

Thurman (14:24)

So

KK Anderson (14:25)

you can you can promote it to our audience and how to how to nail your forecast with a by you know, with your finance background.

Thurman (14:31)

It it takes a

lot of uncomfortable situations though. Yeah.

KK Anderson (14:36)

Well, and you said in our our prep call that this is the most fun you've had in a long time in the seat that you're in now. so what is it about this seat that finally puts all of it to work at once and it's kind of the the great coming together of all of your years of experience and what you're doing in your future. Tell us tell us tell us why.

Thurman (14:54)

it's I think it's appreciating the blessing that I had in the way that I came up, honestly, and being able to share that through teaching. I can't decipher when I'm speaking from a finance perspective, an ops perspective, an overarching business. It's hard for me to distinguish that. And it's because of, you know, the different experiences that I was blessed to to be a part of. but my thermonisms kind of represent that, So as I started to speak about those and just

Appreciate the fact that people that have worked with me for so long have heard me say these things all the time. And I live by them, whether that is directionally correct or 80-20. They all mean they're all tied together and trying to get us to focus on the right things, focus on the real pain. Let's not focus on the exceptional type stuff that actually drains our time, drains our energy.

and gets in the way of us actually producing the outcome we're seeking.

Mark (15:48)

All right, so let's move down to the whole concept of breaking down the silos. Your stated passion is getting people to understand what sits a little to their left and a little to their right. What does that look like as a standing practice inside a revenue team, not only as a value on a wall?

Thurman (16:07)

So, so for me, what that looks like is someone genuinely and every person, literally, I want every person in my team at some point to do this, is to ask someone that is not in their function, what are their goals? What have they actually been asked to achieve in their function? Especially those that are to the left or right. So think about this from if you're in sales, think about marketing to your left, upstream of you.

Think about that CSM that's downstream of you. So many times a sales can sell something and hand it over, and then it's painful to the life of that CSM that's inheriting it. What if that looked differently? What if you truly understood what made retaining a customer easier? And you could do something in your selling process to help that. So

That's what it looks like though, just just leaning a little bit, not trying to go deep and become marketing, not trying to go deep and become the CSM, but just at being being comfortable getting closer to someone and not sitting back to back to them and not really ever asking that type of question.

Another way that I like to do this is to build cadences that include everyone, as opposed to marketing having their cadence, sales having their cadence, CSMs having their cadence. Let's actually bring everybody together so that they can actually hear and see one another and ask questions that can be that every function has to address. How am I going to make sure that we optimize this?

KK Anderson (17:32)

So in a almost in a round table setting where you're bringing in the internal functions and you're you know, it's an internal customer motion.

Thurman (17:40)

Yes, that's kind of what my staff meetings look like, actually.

KK Anderson (17:43)

Mm-hmm.

Yep. I love that. And it's so true. If we treat the cross-functional areas in our company as internal customers, and we're always wanting to, be fanatical about the customer experience, whether it's internal or external. and that's a guiding a guiding value in a North Star. I mean, that's the way to do it. and especially today with AI.

Which you know, an AI workflow breaks down breaks down the silos. You can't even you can't even really think about a company in in terms of departments anymore because, what you can do with AI cross functionally is incredible with being able to to connect the different departments and connect the units. And if you don't know what the other's doing, then you're gonna have a hard time.

Thurman (18:26)

Yes, that's very true. I like that analogy today. I

KK Anderson (18:29)

Yes.

Mark (18:30)

All right, well Thurman, I think this is a good place for us to pause our session one. You've given people some something already that's very concrete to take back. And I I want to let it sit for a minute here before the the next step.

KK Anderson (18:47)

Yes. I especially enjoyed hearing the story about a seller who walked in nervous about how they were gonna hit the number and did the math and walked out energized and and let's just hope they did hit their number. you didn't tell us if they did, but I bet they did, knowing you. so what Thurman just described is also the work we do here at AGS inside the two millimeter club. And the two millimeter club is our small group.

data driven coaching program for frontline sales managers where they learn to identify and coach the small shifts in seller behavior that add up to exponential movement movement and pipeline. We have four eight-week cohorts that launch monthly. And if you'd like to learn more, you can apply at get-ags.com forward slash two mm club. That's get-ags.com.

Ford slash two MM Club. Now come back next week in part two. Thurman takes us takes the same math and points it straight at the customer and tells us where AI actually earns its place in a revenue team. Stay with us.

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General Episode Description:

In Part 2 of this conversation, Denis Scott continues the discussion by exploring what AI accountability looks like inside boardrooms, executive teams, and private equity backed organizations. He explains why leaders must move beyond tracking AI adoption and begin measuring how AI investments contribute to business performance, operational efficiency, and long term enterprise value.

The conversation also examines what separates AI mature organizations from those still experimenting with adoption. Denis shares why AI fluency is becoming a competitive advantage, how organizations can build stronger measurement frameworks, and why the future belongs to companies that combine human judgment with AI driven execution.

What You’ll Learn:

• What boards expect to see when evaluating AI investment
• Why AI measurement is becoming essential during due diligence and company exits
• How AI maturity differs from simple AI adoption
• Why AI fluency creates stronger business outcomes
• How marketing leaders can measure AI performance inside their teams
• Practical ways organizations can improve AI adoption across departments
• Why adaptability is becoming one of the most valuable leadership skills
• How to balance AI efficiency with human creativity and decision making

Key Topics:

• AI governance
• AI measurement
• Private equity and AI
• Board reporting
• AI fluency
• Enterprise AI strategy
• Marketing leadership
• Business outcomes
• AI adoption
• Organizational change
• AI ROI
• Executive leadership

Guest Spotlight: Denis Scott

Denis Scott is the Chief Marketing Officer at Laradin, an AI execution intelligence company focused on helping organizations measure AI adoption, productivity, and business impact. Prior to Laradin, Denis held senior marketing leadership roles at OpenTable, Lyft, SurveyMonkey, Fanatics Betting and Gaming, CharterUp, and other leading technology companies, where he built data driven marketing organizations and enterprise growth strategies.

Resources & Mentions:

• Laradin
• AI execution intelligence
• AI fluency
• AI ROI
• Enterprise AI measurement
• Private equity advisory

🎧 Listen now and follow Selling Intelligence for more conversations with today’s leading revenue executives, AI innovators, and GTM leaders. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Mark Petruzzi (00:00)

Welcome back to Selling Intelligence. I'm Mark Petruzzi.

Alan Rudolph (00:03)

And I'm Alan Rudolph. This is part two with Dennis Scott, CMO of Laradin. Be sure to go back and listen to part one fascinating discussion. this broad, you know, where are we today in this in this AI world? But if you want to start here, let's bring you up to speed. Dennis Scott spent over 20 years in marketing at firms like Open Table and Lyft, SurveyMonkey, Fanatics, Betting, and Gaming before becoming CMO of Charter Up. In part

One, he told us what brought him into Laradin, an AI execution intelligence company built to answer the question most enterprises cannot answer today. Is the AI spend actually working? He walked us through why 72% of enterprises call AI adoption their biggest challenge. I mean, just fascinating data. And how does Laradin Scott platform reveal when companies finally see their own

AI usage data.

Mark Petruzzi (00:59)

So in part two, we get into the boardroom where we love to be. What this means for private equity bac pr private equity backed companies staring down an exit, and what it actually looks like on the other side once an organization gets measurement done right, whether they are a private equity portfolio company, other s medium sized organizations, or even the enterprise ones. We're all stressing and

being challenged by the same things. Dennis, welcome back.

Denis Scott (01:28)

Thank

you for having me back. This is great. Yeah, I really enjoyed the conversation in the first one.

Alan Rudolph (01:32)

You know, Dennis, as I sit in board meetings where AI spend is being, addressed at a line item level, and sponsors are asking about measurement, about business value, and management teams are trying to defend what they did, why they did it, where where is my expense? Where's my capital allocation, etc.? What should a portfolio company CEO be able to show a board today that most simply cannot?

Denis Scott (01:58)

Yeah, this is exactly where our product lands often is in board conversations, right? And so we are finding that teams are leveraging our Larid and data to have those conversations. And so what they're really trying to show the board is is really the two thing, well, three things I should say. One, how has our organization adopted AI, So is it is it only engineering? Is it across functions? What what does it look like AI within within the the company?

The second thing is, what does our spend look like on AI? And

Alan Rudolph (02:30)

Mm.

Denis Scott (02:31)

that number, whatever that number may be, naturally that leads to, well, I don't know, is that good or bad? Are we spending enough or are we doing too little? so then that naturally leads to, well, what are the business outcomes from that investment? And so as a marketer, I think about you ask those same questions around a marketing budget, Like, wow, this is an investment. What are we getting for that?

How is it looking?

Alan Rudolph (02:52)

Mm.

Denis Scott (02:52)

How is it impacting the business? And so really leaders should be able to go into those boardrooms and have that conversation. And that's exactly why we find a lot of organizations coming to us and saying, I have this problem. I don't know how to answer these questions. Right.

Alan Rudolph (03:07)

Got

it.

Mark Petruzzi (03:07)

So Dennis, with the world class companies that you have been the marketing leader of and the rooms you have been in with executive teams on board having to defend your budgets and proving impact, what's the difference between a CMO who can walk into that conversation with data and the one that who's still working off of andotes?

Denis Scott (03:29)

I think it's the a piece, and I'm glad you asked that, Mark. It's a piece that's really helped me define my own career. I actually learned early on that senior marketing leaders that were really successful actually are are able to speak to data and look at things like ROI and investments and budgets and forecasts.

I think now marketing leaders are actually facing this new question, which everybody's facing, which is not only what is your marketing investment, but how are you leveraging AI with that? And being able to speak to those, I think is really starting to separate the the CMO world in many ways. I've always realized going into a conversation with CEOs and CFOs,

The creative is great and they love to see that and that represents the brand, but they're naturally going to ask you, what are the outcomes? Right. And so I think AI is the same way for marketing leaders. What are the outcomes? What are you seeing from that? so I just think I've seen it all over LinkedIn that the the role of a CMO has changed to sort of almost like a part data analyst slash engineer in some ways, right?

Alan Rudolph (04:35)

awesome. So put your put yourself in the seat of a portfolio company six months before sale. What would you tell them to start measuring right now so that when AI adoption gets discussed during the due diligence process, you can drive the conversation versus, sort of s you know, the blank stare what as the questions get asked.

Denis Scott (04:57)

Yeah, I think the the idea here, Alan, is you want to be concrete, You want when posed that question, you want to be able to say, this is how we're using AI. This is how much it's costing us, and this is what we're using it for. And that's how this drives the business, right? And if you think about a conversation where you walk in and say, Hey, we have great AI adoption. we think the costs are this. I don't know exactly

Alan Rudolph (05:20)

Mm-hmm.

Denis Scott (05:21)

what it's doing.

It's going to be tricky because as on those exits, a lot of that is the a lot of the due diligence is around the numbers, And so the more concrete you can be across all of those numbers, the more confidence you're gonna build in and be able to close that deal. I just think we we can't avoid that these questions are coming around AI for everybody,

Mark Petruzzi (05:42)

Yeah, and just to remind everyone that we use these examples around private equity for two reasons. One is we have a very successful private equity group that Alan leads for us at AGS. but even Alan is not a private equity own only guy. He's been in in in many publicly traded companies and other types of companies throughout his career. So Dennis, when you when you look at that, again

when you're dealing with a public company, you have a very, very distinct process where everything is being analyzed of every quarter of every year. is is this a good analogy that we're doing with private equity? Because now private private equity has has built those kind of processes. They look at it very similar to what what needs to happen for a public company from a reporting perspective. Is there any

Are there any differences or is it just a nice setup that just allows you to work with companies, whether they are, private equity owned or whether they are public organizations as well?

Denis Scott (06:43)

It's good question, Mark. I think about it in terms of of of one of the words I love to use for marketers as well is accountability. And I

Alan Rudolph (06:50)

Mm-hmm.

Denis Scott (06:51)

I think that's really the idea behind the process. every three months, when I worked in public companies and I worked in prepping for their earnings calls and even joining their earnings calls, marketing was always a big topic, And it was because, outside of salaries and if you were in a retail company leases.

Marketing was one of the larger line items. So naturally analysts would push on that, right? And say, Well, how's this working? And I used to think to myself after we got off the call, okay, I've got three months until I have to be able to say something again of what we've done. Right. And it sort of it creates that sense of urgency. Like I can't go back

Alan Rudolph (07:23)

Right.

Denis Scott (07:27)

and say, Well, I didn't do anything the last three months, And I think in a world where AI is changing.

not weekly. I mean, it's changing daily, if not hourly, To to wait three months feels fair because three months from now, who knows what AI is going to look like, what models are out there, how teams are using

Alan Rudolph (07:44)

Mm.

Denis Scott (07:45)

it. And so I think private equity adopting that notion of that kind of quarterly check-in and what's changing what is completely fair in a world that's moving this fast. so yeah.

I liked the model that held me accountable as a CMO for sure. and so I think adopting that, I just think the complexity of it might be doing that across a whole portfolio of companies is is obviously more complex, You have to be the

Mark Petruzzi (08:06)

Yes. Yeah.

Alan Rudolph (08:07)

Yep, yep.

Denis Scott (08:08)

analyst for a lot of earnings calls, if you will.

Mark Petruzzi (08:11)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Alan Rudolph (08:11)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (08:12)

And the good news with private equity firms, almost all of them are managing very tightly to each quarter. So it's really no different than a public approach. Matter of fact, some of them are are really looking at every one of those numbers monthly as well to make sure they don't find themselves behind the eight ball. Okay. So the next topic, the path forward, what AI mature organizations actually look like. These are the

the ones that you described that have really built up their acumen versus, a lot of companies that are still just trying to get a feel for AI. So when

Alan Rudolph (08:48)

Mm.

Mark Petruzzi (08:49)

you look across organizations already using Laradin's data well, what do AI mature ones actually do differently day to day? Not just what shows up on a dashboard.

Denis Scott (09:00)

Yeah, it it's interesting. I think the the even the idea that organizations are are coming to Lariden shows that they are very aware of of this AI challenge, the the ones that may not be thinking about this yet. And we have conversations with companies that are very frank and say, Hey, I haven't we haven't really even started our AI journey yet. Can you can you help us here, That that does still exist. But

If you think about it, we have clients across so many different verticals, We have healthcare,

Alan Rudolph (09:29)

Mm-hmm.

Denis Scott (09:31)

tech, travel, construction, right? AI is one of the most interesting things in our lifetimes of how it's really across every industry. I mean, doctors are using like it's just so interesting, the adoption of it. And I think those that are embracing it and what we see in our data is.

Some of our early customers are actually some of the most proficient, users of AI and really driving value out of it. And it in some ways it was almost like a gut check, Like I'm doing this right. and so I think those organizations that have been embracing it, open-minded to it, and also finding pockets where it could be better or I'm not using the right tool, those sort of things, those companies are actually seeing a tremendous amount of value.

not only in understanding their data, but also just in knowing where they're at. And the horizontal nature of our product, there's also usually an opportunity, you'll find a function or a team where it's like, as much as w these teams are using it, this team is maybe lagging a little bit. Right. And so it also gives you a little a sense of focus. And I think that's what really separates them is that all teams are are leveraging AI across the organization to drive more of those business outcomes in their areas.

Alan Rudolph (10:42)

Got it. Great Dennis. so as you're talking

Mark Petruzzi (10:43)

Before we

Alan Rudolph (10:44)

about these with these different, pros customers today across all these industries, you track something called AI fluency, different than just adoption. What's the difference, Why does the leadership team need to care about fluency versus adoption?

Denis Scott (10:59)

So the easiest way to describe this is adoption. And I'll go back to a world that I lived in. And when we had to report to our private equity owners on on that quarterly basis, I would generally just ask my teams, are you using AI? And it was a yes, no, right. And then,

Alan Rudolph (11:16)

Hmm. Yep.

Denis Scott (11:17)

generally it was a survey, and then I would say, Is it working? And a hundred times out of a hundred, everybody would say, Yes, right, because

were set, were told, hey, you gotta adopt AI, and you don't want to say, no, it's not really working for me. Right. and so adoption tends to be yes-no type question throughout teams and functions. And you you always find there are teams not adopting it, and there's reasons why, or maybe it doesn't make sense.

Alan Rudolph (11:40)

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Denis Scott (11:42)

or maybe they don't even have access to tools, I mean, and so it's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's a yes-no question. Fluency for us is really

How are you using these tools? Right. Are you just using the tool to do research that you could potentially do through search that, is now costing the company money that, you know, doesn't have to?

Alan Rudolph (12:04)

Used to be free,

Denis Scott (12:05)

free. That's right. Yeah. Or, the advertiser paid for it. Now it's your company's paying for it, right? And so do I need to be using AI for this? Is that the right tool?

versus all the way up to like, hey, we're actually creating great code at a faster rate and we're using it for code review in this way. Like that's how we start to score what are the types of prompts, what are people doing with it, And we score those prompts and we put those those folks into categories or groups. I should say we don't do it individually, we do it at the the sort of manager level as long as the team is big enough.

Alan Rudolph (12:37)

And that's all driving back to business outcomes, I mean what

Denis Scott (12:38)

That's right. about the business.

Alan Rudolph (12:40)

a fascinating example of, it was free yesterday and now I go to my favorite AI tool today and it cost me money. That I mean, every CFO that's listening to that comment is is ready to pull their hair out and or call you, Dennis. I mean, one or the other, right?

Denis Scott (12:54)

I'm smiling

because I've done, search marketing. I won't say for how long, but it's it it's over it's got a two in front of it. but I always thought about search. I kind of started early in the digital side on the SEO side and got into paid and was like, I'm then the advertiser. And so like I really want to optimize those free clicks, but then I'm paying for it. And now folks are using AI and it's like, well, now the company's incurring the cost of that search.

And pe I don't think people think of it that way, It's like when should you be using search and when should you be using AI is really interesting.

Alan Rudolph (13:25)

He was a sure.

Absolutely. Mark, bring us home.

Mark Petruzzi (13:27)

And ca and com

yeah, and can companies wanna spend money, especially CFOs, only on what they want and they've analyzed and they've decided to spend money on. Not money that they they they don't either have to or know they're going to. So Dennis, that's very insightful the whole session, but even some of those final points there.

So last question before we move on to the our lightning round. If a revenue or market marketing leader listening today wanted to go from flying blind to AI mature in the next two quarters or so, what's the recipe you'd recommend?

Denis Scott (14:08)

Yeah,

I'm gonna shamelessly say that the Laridan data would really help you understand even your starting point where you're at. I think that's one of the hardest things. You know, if I was to say to a marketing leader, you know, how is your team using AI? And you were to say, we're, we're doing it for I don't know, image editing or that sort of thing. It's like, well, if I was to say how much does that cost?

Not many people are able to answer that, And so to be a really effective marketing leader, it's like, I really want to kind of understand my cost structure, how people are using it, where there are opportunities to use it more, and are we are we seeing business outcomes? And I think the the way I think about AI is how can I use these tools to speed the process up so that I spend my human time doing these quality elements, like, reviewing the content.

editing into the voice, the right voice, that that sort of thing where you're really putting that that that human stamp on what's going out to the world about your brand about your business. And so I think marketing leaders that kind of balance that AI usage with the human aspect and the quality of people on

Alan Rudolph (15:13)

Yeah, yeah.

Denis Scott (15:14)

their team is where you're going to see those. That's to me world class now. and so people probably don't know where they're at on that curve sometimes. I know as a

marketing leader in prior roles, I sure didn't know exactly that equation. And now obviously I sit in a in a biased seat where I see that more. But that's really what we're seeing the best marketing leaders do.

Alan Rudolph (15:35)

Got it.

Mark Petruzzi (15:35)

Excellent. Let's move to rapid fire. So Dennis, what was the first product or service you ever sold throughout your life?

Denis Scott (15:43)

Yeah, when when I was fifteen years old, I walked down to the mall in San Francisco. I grew up in San Francisco by my house called Stonestown. I walked into a Nordstrom's and I applied for a job and they asked me if I could start that day. And I was I was stocking shoes in the back for the half yearly sale. And then

Alan Rudolph (16:02)

Mm.

Denis Scott (16:03)

the sale started on my day three, and our two salespeople were late and didn't show for the sale to start. So my

My manager asked if I wanted to be a shoe salesperson, and I said yes. and I sold shoes on and off at Nordstrom's for six years.

Alan Rudolph (16:19)

We're not gonna go down

Mark Petruzzi (16:19)

Very cool.

Alan Rudolph (16:20)

that path, but we could ask you a lot of discussions there. So we'll

Denis Scott (16:22)

Okay.

Alan Rudolph (16:23)

leave we'll leave that one lying. Who is your favorite CMO or marketing leader that you follow? One name.

Denis Scott (16:30)

One name. I would go with Veneet at Chime. I love following what he says. I love what that team has done. I think they push AI in really interesting ways. yeah, I

Alan Rudolph (16:39)

Awesome.

Denis Scott (16:39)

great follow on on on LinkedIn.

Mark Petruzzi (16:42)

Great. So what is a leadership or go to market practice you think every sales and marketing leader should adopt?

Denis Scott (16:48)

I think it's really trying to understand the solutions for your customers, right? Whether that's a B2C product or a B2B product, the the the human element of why do they need my product is really

Alan Rudolph (17:01)

Mm.

Denis Scott (17:01)

powerful. Or what does my product do that makes them more successful and where they're at, Or more confident in who they are. so I think

Alan Rudolph (17:08)

Yep, yeah.

Denis Scott (17:10)

that notion of not marketing to people, but really trying to understand the solution you're providing, right?

is really powerful for both sales and marketing to be aligned against and do that in your go to market motion together.

Alan Rudolph (17:22)

Yeah. Great Dennis. Okay, here's here's a little teaser. You're now twenty one years old, or you were twenty-one years old at what point? What advice today would you give that twenty-one year old self?

Denis Scott (17:34)

So it's a really interesting one. I think the data piece I feel confident that I kind of embraced early on. The

Alan Rudolph (17:40)

Yeah.

Denis Scott (17:41)

piece I think I'd advise myself and I tell this to all marketers is really being adaptable, The business

is always gonna change, the tools are gonna change, everything's gonna change. I know we talked about every three months reporting to the board. Well,

That's because everything changed in those three months. Right. I mean, we used to joke in tech that six months was a long time. Now three months in AI feels like a really long time. right. And so just being adaptable. And I think my my 21 year old self would have walked in and said, I know how this works. I'm going to do it this way. Right. And it's like, no, just know it's going to change.

Mark Petruzzi (18:15)

Amazing stuff. great. Well, Dennis, th thanks for bringing real data to a topic that is mostly running on very qualitative processes right now, not quantitative ones. Where should people go to find your work and Laradin's? and also I'll I'll put it out there, anyone, of course, going directly to Laradin, great. But anyone who wants to reach out to me, Alan or KK,

please do that as well because we have we have really grown very fond of the product and the product set and can help you figure out the way to really turn it on as well.

Denis Scott (18:52)

Yeah, that's great. I mean, I'm thank you all. This is this has been fun and it's it's really exciting topics and work that's going on. happy for anybody to to visit us at Laridan, visit our website. I think our leadership team are are some really interesting follows on LinkedIn as well. we are sitting on data that that in many ways nobody is sitting on, and so

We're doing research and we're sharing that as well. We're producing white papers. so there's a lot more coming that I think is gonna be really helpful for people to read and kind of understand on a lot of these trends and what we're seeing, even there's a new model out every day. Well, we're testing it and using them all. so yeah, that's great.

Alan Rudolph (19:32)

Great.

Thanks, Dennis. We'll make sure all that data's in the show notes. And if what Dennis said about measuring the AI impact sits with you, that's exactly the conversation we're having inside our PE advisory practice. Tying AI adoption directly to an EBITDA multiple at exit. Learn what it learn more about this. Come visit us at getags.com and learn about the PE advisory practice.

Mark Petruzzi (20:00)

And if this conversation conversation was useful for you, send it to your leader or another member of your network who you think may need it most. I'm Mark Petruzzi.

Alan Rudolph (20:11)

And I'm Alan Rudolph and this is Selling Intelligence. We'll see you next time. Thank you.

Mark Petruzzi (20:16)

All the best.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

General Episode Description:

In this episode of Selling Intelligence, Denis Scott, Chief Marketing Officer at Laradin, joins Mark Petruzzi and Alan Rudolph to explore one of the biggest questions facing business leaders today: how do you measure whether AI is actually delivering business value?

Drawing from his experience leading marketing at companies like OpenTable, Lyft, SurveyMonkey, and Fanatics, Denis explains why AI adoption is no longer enough. Organizations now need visibility into how AI is being used, where it creates measurable outcomes, and where it introduces unnecessary complexity. The conversation explores the challenges of measuring AI investments, hidden AI costs across organizations, and how executives can connect AI usage directly to business performance.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why AI adoption alone is no longer a meaningful success metric
• How organizations can connect AI usage to measurable business outcomes
• The hidden AI costs most companies fail to track
• Why measuring AI proficiency matters more than measuring adoption
• How AI improves workflows when applied to the right business processes
• Common mistakes organizations make when introducing AI into daily work
• Why executive teams need visibility into enterprise wide AI usage
• How AI measurement helps boards, CFOs, and executives make better investment decisions

Key Topics:

• AI measurement and ROI
• Enterprise AI adoption
• AI proficiency versus adoption
• Hidden AI costs
• AI workflow optimization
• Marketing leadership
• Executive decision making
• AI governance
• Business outcomes
• AI productivity measurement
• Board reporting
• Enterprise technology strategy

Guest Spotlight: Denis Scott

Denis Scott is the Chief Marketing Officer at Laradin, an AI execution intelligence company focused on helping organizations measure AI adoption, productivity, and business impact. Prior to Laradin, Denis held senior marketing leadership roles at OpenTable, Lyft, SurveyMonkey, Fanatics Betting and Gaming, CharterUp, and other leading technology companies, where he built data driven marketing organizations and enterprise growth strategies.

Resources & Mentions:

• Laradin
• Comscore
• OpenTable
• Lyft
• SurveyMonkey
• Fanatics Betting and Gaming
• CharterUp
• AI execution intelligence
• AI ROI

🎧 Listen now and follow Selling Intelligence for more conversations with today’s leading revenue executives, AI innovators, and GTM leaders. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Mark Petruzzi (00:00)

Welcome to Selling Intelligence. I'm Mark Petruzzi.

Alan Rudolph (00:03)

And I'm Alan Rudolph.

Mark Petruzzi (00:04)

Every company we work with has the same exact story right now. Budget is improved, tools rolled out, adoptions declared a win in some sort of a board deck, and almost nobody can tell you with real data whether any of it has moved the business at all.

Alan Rudolph (00:22)

Our guest built his career on the marketing side of some of the biggest consumer brands in tech, and now he's on the other side of that exact problem. Dennis Scott spent over 20 years leading marketing at Open Table, Lyft, SurveyMonkey, and Fanatics Betting and Gaming, and most recently served as CMO of Charter Up. He's now CMO of Laradin, an AI execution intelligence company built by the team that created the original.

Digital Measurement Infrastructure at ComScore. Dennis, welcome to Selling Intelligence.

Denis Scott (00:56)

Hi everybody and Alan and Mark, thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here.

Mark Petruzzi (01:00)

Excellent. So we'll jump right into topic one. it and it's entitled From Consumer Marketplaces to AI Measurement, Dennis's Plant Path to Laradin. So, Dennis, you spent your career building brands people trust. they trust the the those companies with their money and their time. Companies like Open Table, Lyft, SurveyMonkey.

What did you see that pulled you towards an enterprise AI measurement company at this point in your career?

Denis Scott (01:27)

Yeah, I think I've had the fortune of working for some great brands throughout my career, which has been an incredible experience. But one of the things that, as a marketing leader, you're always accountable for is really the the measurement, given that you're you're usually one of the largest line items on a PL. And as we all know, this AI explosion three years ago, none of us were really living in this world. And now

It's sort of the topic of the day every day, every and so as a marketing leader, one of the problems I saw was this is really hard to quantify and understand. And how do we how do we figure this out? And so when I learned and heard about Laridan and the team that was running it, I almost ran to it living here in the Bay Area, being surrounded by this AI challenge and opportunity.

To know that somebody is actually solving how do I think about this? How do I understand this? And how do I communicate this to leadership, to boards, to investors?

Alan Rudolph (02:26)

Awesome. great intro, Dennis. So Laridan's entire pitch is built on radical honesty. Love that comment about what's

Denis Scott (02:34)

Right.

Alan Rudolph (02:35)

actually happening within a company, within a company from an AI spend standpoint. And that's not always flattering, as we know in today's marketplace. So, how is marketing that kind of product different from marketing some of the journeys that you've been on more of a consumer brand?

Denis Scott (02:52)

Yeah, I steal from that old adage in marketing, half of my marketing is working, I just don't know which half. And so I think we should we should always be open to the idea that not everything is working. And you know, as a measurement platform and identifying opportunities for organizations through workflows, and we can get in deeper into that, I think it's actually important to share the good and the bad.

Right, or I would say the good and the opportunity, right? And it is different than marketing a consumer brand because often a consumer brand, there's this this almost one-to-one relationship. Whereas in an enterprise type motion, you're you're solving across these large organizations, right? And those those opportunities that you're identifying.

we are a very horizontal product working across all functions. You may not even know where those opportunities lie or where things are are going really well. And so I think you just are are talking about a one-to-many relationship and how we can help solve a f a, sort of organizational wide opportunity slash challenge, and so I think that's where.

In a consumer brand, you could be talking to to people that fit your constituents, right? whatever it is.

Alan Rudolph (04:05)

Mm-hmm.

Denis Scott (04:05)

when I worked at Clorox, I worked on STP. It's like our our our target set was 18 to 34 year old males, And so

Mark Petruzzi (04:11)

Mm-hmm.

Denis Scott (04:12)

that was that one-to-one relationship. Whereas now it's like, hey, you're talking to senior executives about, yeah, how do we understand this AI investment and what are the business outcomes we're seeing from it? So it's there's still a personal element to it, but it's a

much larger solved in some ways.

Alan Rudolph (04:28)

Got it.

Mark Petruzzi (04:28)

Yeah, and Dennis, what's interesting is when w as I've learned about Laradin over the last couple months, it strikes me as a company that is building that kind of consumer relationship just with executives rather than all consumers. So, and the way I look at it, especially having the the fact that I'm on two boards, any board director

should be building their relationship with with Laradin because in that standpoint, these are all the things that at the board level and the senior executive level, these this is all the data you need to know, especially about something AI. And by the way, I think I'd like to take that quote you just made about marketing and make it about AI. because same thing, I know my

Denis Scott (05:14)

Right. Same thing.

Mark Petruzzi (05:16)

AI is working. I just, I just don't know which half.

So and and every company, every single company, big and small, is going through that same challenge right now.

Denis Scott (05:26)

it's interesting, Mark. You sit in the right spot here for who our our target audience is, which is boards are asking these questions, investors are asking these questions. if you look at earnings calls a year ago, tokens didn't come up that often. Now that's skyrocketed as far as questions go,

Alan Rudolph (05:43)

Right.

Denis Scott (05:44)

But if you think about it, right, th I'm gonna make a silly statement, but if I used to say, hey, on an earnings call and I

was fortunate enough to prep a lot of these and work side by side and be on these calls because marketing was such a large investment, right? So let's say marketing you're spending fifty million dollars, naturally they would say, Hey, what are you getting for that investment? How is that working? Right. Those are the right questions to ask. We often now find that in AI, it's like, hey, you're spending $50 million, what are you getting for that? And it's very hard to answer.

I don't blame people. This is what we're solving, but but boards are asking those questions, investors are asking those questions, CFOs are asking those questions, And that's really what we're building and where our customers see the value is, shoot, I'm getting that question from my board and I don't know how to answer it. Right now I'm using surveys and asking people, and I think I know what people are using, and it's really kind of it's very, very challenging, to answer that.

Mark Petruzzi (06:39)

Yeah. And it has to

Alan Rudolph (06:39)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (06:40)

be and it has to be so much more precise than that for it to really work. Meaning the the surveys, the feeling the feelings, the a lot of companies, even some big ones that I work with, are looking at wow, they just wanna get AI in the hands of their their employee base. It's not about that. It's it's it takes a lot more precision. So Dennis, you're a CMO of a company who

you measure marketing and really every other function from an AI productivity standpoint. Does that change how you think about proving your own team's impact internally?

Denis Scott (07:16)

Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I mean, you kind of it's one of those the expression like you should be drinking your own water, your own champagne, whatever expression you want to use. So, we are an AI first company and we it's AI native built. really AI adoption across our company is a hundred percent, but we all use it. It's how you use it and how proficient you are. And that's part of what we get into at.

Alan Rudolph (07:40)

Okay.

Denis Scott (07:41)

can we help you understand how people are using AI, not just are they adopting it? Right. And so at a company where I'm at, I myself even as a CMO, I'm very hands-on in AI, I'm able to do a lot without having to ask other teams or other people. And I think that's how we approach a lot of what we do. Now it doesn't

It doesn't replace the human element of measuring quality or understanding is that as a marketer on brand or not on brand and how do we word this? I kind of have a general rule of thumb. If it's under 500 words, write it myself. just because I want to get that voice and tone right. Sure, I use AI sometimes on longer pieces to to help get me started. And then I always go in with that human touch. But yeah, I think in in the type of company we work in, which I think

Is honestly how a lot of companies are going to operate and look

Alan Rudolph (08:32)

Hmm.

Denis Scott (08:32)

as they progress. Maybe we're a little bit ahead because we live and breathe this every day. but I think that's how companies will operate. And I actually think it's pretty exciting because what people end up doing is I spend my time doing the things I want to do rather than some of the things that used

Alan Rudolph (08:47)

The same.

Denis Scott (08:48)

to be the the pain to try to get to. Right.

Alan Rudolph (08:51)

Right.

Denis Scott (08:52)

so you're actually taking humans and you're saying,

You're doing the most important task in spending your time there rather than some of these other tasks that AI can just speed up and help you with.

Alan Rudolph (09:01)

Yeah. Great great feedback, Dennis. So let let's move on to a another topic, so relevant today, which is again, where where does Larin play? How do we measure? What kind of data is available to us? It's a fascinating statistic in terms of AI spend last year, six hundred plus billion dollars, Just a phenomenal number. and again, it all comes back to, when I think about how do we drive business value.

Right.

How do how does how do our customers, how do our clients, whether it's AGS, Larada, et cetera, how do they drive business value? So Larada's own research in terms of the research I've been doing found that 72% of enterprises say AI adoption has become their biggest challenge, Every C level executive, They want to do AI. How do I measure it? And obviously, 600 plus billion, if I'm not getting value, then it's ultimately hurting the bottom line.

So walk us through what it actually looks like inside a company. What are leaders getting wrong?

Denis Scott (09:57)

Yeah, great question, Alan. I think what's really interesting is if we rolled back the clocks to a year ago, AI adoption was the topic of the day. And it was almost the sort of this binary question, yes or no? Are you using it? Are you adopting it? Yes. Okay, well,

Alan Rudolph (10:11)

Right, right.

Denis Scott (10:11)

great. That that adds to the value of your organization, Or no, it's like, you guys better learn how to do this, right? And so I think there was this almost mad rush to tell.

as a leader, to tell your teams or to tell your organization we have to adopt AI, we have to do it. And I even lived in that world where it was was a mandate. Everybody has to be using AI, But that that tells you how at that time sort of almost uneducated were in what you could actually do with that kind of notion of like you have to use

Alan Rudolph (10:39)

Hmm. Yep.

Denis Scott (10:40)

it because there's a cost behind it, right? And that's exactly what you're speaking to with that investment. And

In anything you do in business, when you have a large number like that, naturally the question is going to follow. And this is why Laridin exists. I mean, and Jim and Russ have really built their career around this. When you're throwing a lot of money at things, it doesn't mean it's right or wrong, but you're going to have to measure it and tell that story and understand it. And that's really what we've built. And so I think the challenge for leaders was we rush so fast to say, our team's using it yes or no.

Alan Rudolph (11:14)

Mm-hmm.

Denis Scott (11:14)

And now

that we're a bit more sophisticated and understand these tools and quite honestly have seen examples, particularly this May, where

companies had spent their whole budget by April that we all know, and or somebody was spending five million dollars a day because they were gamifying, AI adoption and token spend. Well, all of a sudden it hit us of like, well, what what is the value? What is the business outcome? And I think

That's the number one question now, which is is a great question and probably the most

Mark Petruzzi (11:37)

Yeah.

Denis Scott (11:41)

important question that we get from organizations and senior execs and quite honestly boards as well is not only what is my spend and how do I make sure I'm getting that Because that is actually pretty complex to even get to that number,

Alan Rudolph (11:53)

Mm.

Denis Scott (11:54)

but then what are the business outcomes I'm seeing from that spend? Right. And that's the piece I think.

we kind of hear those questions in that order, like, I don't really fully understand this. And then, but by the way, what am I getting for that? And so that's where w Laridan is really built to connect those dots. But that question didn't exist a year ago, We almost we almost bought ourselves a year by checking the box. Yes, we're using AI, right? And now the question naturally has come is like, okay, but what are you getting for that? Right. And I think budget

Alan Rudolph (12:21)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Denis Scott (12:22)

season is probably a very interesting time to be having this conversation because

Mark Petruzzi (12:27)

Okay.

Denis Scott (12:27)

When

you go in to the board and say, I need thirty percent more token usage next year, every board member is gonna say why? And if you can't answer that, that's gonna be a tricky conversation to have, So

Alan Rudolph (12:38)

Hmm. Got

Mark Petruzzi (12:39)

Yeah,

Alan Rudolph (12:40)

it.

Mark Petruzzi (12:40)

you

know. And that's one of the reasons why at AGS we have built set of offerings that really is built around AI to ROI. we use that term and I'll give a little credit to a close friend of mine for for naming his podcast after that. you know, and I should be clear, he he he came up with the podcast first, so I guess I've we've run with it from there. His name is Ray Reich.

He has been an incredible CEO and leader in the benchmarking space, starting more on the finance side, more on the like private equity metrics that private equity firms are looking at before they acquire a company. and he's now moved moved very deeply into the AI space as well. So at the end of the day, what we say at AGS is AGS amplifies like

I'm sorry, AI amplifies whatever motion, whatever process you have, whether it's in go to market or other functional teams, whatever you've built already, it's going to amplify it. And that's going to give you either a good or bad, meaning these there's lots of poor processes out there that are being amplified amplified every single day. So how does that match the pattern that you're seeing in Laridan's data?

is AI adoption exposing execution problems that were already there? And is that happen often? not as often. What are you seeing out there?

Denis Scott (14:07)

Yeah, we measure millions of of kind of moments, when you think about our customer base, we have tens of thousands of of users on our platform, And so the

Alan Rudolph (14:17)

Mm-hmm.

Denis Scott (14:18)

when you think about workflows and how AI is being used, and think about your own personal experience, how often you're you're touching an AI tool, it's it's for a lot of people, it's almost daily. but really there's some interesting patterns that we see. One is

this is one of the things we like to measure is again, not just adoption, but proficiency. And it's it's proprietary how we've done that and scored that, but essentially it's looking at the types of things you're using AI for, So what are the prompts? And one of the the challenges we see is folks you are using AI, but they're using it in a way that isn't necessarily, more productive. So I'll give you an example.

We have seen where, back in the day you used to write an email and maybe you would reread it before you send it and you make a few edits and you would send it. Now we see at times people are taking every email they're writing, dropping it into AI. It's not getting the voice right, it's not getting the the tone right, it's adding dashes, it's doing things you don't want. And that email now has has gone into this AI world where maybe there's 15 takes, 20 takes to get this email right. Whereas like

Alan Rudolph (15:23)

Holy

cow.

Denis Scott (15:24)

You didn't need AI in that

instance, You just kind of added a bottleneck to the process, whereas there are other things where I think about a go to market motion with an enterprise sales team. It's like the ability to take something like a gong call, digest that, move that into a sales force. Like now what teams are doing is actually preparing better for the next call because AI is doing some of that, call it task.

type work and

moving data around and summarizing, and there are even AI tools where it's like, okay, now I'm gonna, I'm gonna mirror the client and you can have a practice run. Right. So in that sense, it's actually amplifying it because it's back to what were talking about. It's like actually the salespeople are spending their time doing the most important task, which is prepping for this call and understanding their customer and what the needs of that customer are. Right. So

There's positives and negatives, especially in a

Alan Rudolph (16:15)

Yeah.

Denis Scott (16:16)

go-to-market motion, that we see. What our tool actually does that's interesting as well is we will identify within your workflows, one of the most interesting is when AI is there and when AI is not within the exact same workflow. And often what you see is AI is is a helpful tool or you're able to do more complex things. It doesn't always mean it's faster, but but the outcomes are better. but there's also opportunities where we identify.

You've added AI into this workflow and it's really not helping. It's causing a lot more friction. and so

Alan Rudolph (16:45)

Mm-hmm. Right. Right.

Denis Scott (16:47)

that's the honesty element of our our platform and tool and the feedback we want to give to customers. We tried to make everything look great. you we're not being honest with customers, And so that's really an interesting thing about AI: is where is it, where is it really having an impact for the positive and where is it actually creating?

More friction or being a bottleneck and not actually producing great value.

Alan Rudolph (17:07)

Right.

I love that comment, Dennis, about the dashes in an email. Like we've all been there, right? No way. Did who

Denis Scott (17:12)

Reha.

Alan Rudolph (17:14)

who wrote this email and why are those dashes there? So anyway Exactly.

Denis Scott (17:17)

Exactly. Who am I talking to?

Alan Rudolph (17:20)

Is it is it Claude ChatGBT or is it actually the person I want to talk to? So every CFO I've worked with inside a portfolio company

good news, they can tell you exactly how much money they've spent on AI tools by month, by quarter, by year, whatever time period they want to look at. But we're not there yet in terms of the return, Coming back to that comment about the business outcome. Why is that gap so much wider for AI than other technology investments, whether it was ERP, CRM, marketing automation, though those initiatives all had very well defined

Charters, project plan, scope, and ROI. AI AI we're struggling with. And so why is that data succinctly?

Denis Scott (18:00)

I think there's two factors. One is the speed of which we all adopted AI, So got ahead of ourselves and we all started using it. And then the CFO would get a bill, And go, wow. Okay.

Alan Rudolph (18:07)

Yep. sh darn.

Denis Scott (18:12)

there are also, I will just say there are some hidden costs to AI that they're we find this almost every time with customers. We have had customers where, they say, Hey, we're using these tools and it's kind of in the tens to twenties, right?

Alan Rudolph (18:25)

Only.

Denis Scott (18:25)

And then we actually implement our solution and we can see all the tools being used and it's often in the hundreds, And part of that that is happening is is naturally, if I'm on a marketing team and I decide to use a product, let's say like Canva, and I

Alan Rudolph (18:39)

Mm-hmm.

Denis Scott (18:40)

just grab a license for myself so I can edit some photography or videos, I may just swipe my credit card and expense it like a travel expense, like a meal,

And so that's really hard for a CFO to completely understand what are all the tools and where is all my hidden cost on AI that I don't even technically get a bill for. It looks like 20 bucks and marketing has somebody doing this, So that that that's part of the complexity of it. But this the second thing is exactly what you were saying, Alan, which is well, what are these teams doing and did that What were those outcomes? And that's why we built our workflows product connected to that token usage, right? Which is

What did the team use it for? Where was AI within this workflow? And we can see within those workflows, going back to our example of a sales team, you can watch that process of prepping for a call. It's like, where was was a tool introduced? And then, was that call effective, successful? Right. That's where it starts

Alan Rudolph (19:33)

Mm-hmm.

Denis Scott (19:34)

to come into, I'm starting to really understand the outputs of how how teams are doing this. Right. And I'll give you an example from

from the marketing side of things, a kind of hidden cost in marketing. And we've we've had a couple of customers come to us and say, I can't fully understand why my marketing team is spending so much in in token usage. Well, one of the heaviest things you can do in token usage is video creation and editing. Why? Because it's so heavy on the data side of things. And you know, you used to outsource this sometimes to to third party companies that would do a lot of the editing for you. And now

Some of the teams are trying to do it in-house, themselves. But what they don't realize is is that AI cost of what they're doing. Now, you could argue the business outcome is good because I didn't have to outsource it, or geez, this token. And that's kind of the decision making process we're hearing a lot of organizations make on these different workflows and what teams are using what AI and even what version they're using, That that really plays into it. I mean, the

That is where the complexity starts to add up, Which

is, well, what version of Claude are they using when they did that?

Alan Rudolph (20:37)

Right.

Denis Scott (20:38)

most CFOs don't have all of that data because it changes

Alan Rudolph (20:41)

Granular.

Denis Scott (20:41)

all the time. I mean, these models change honestly every week. And, if you were to go across Claude versus OpenAI versus Gemini versus codex, that they're all kind of priced differently and it evolves, right? And

Alan Rudolph (20:53)

Mm. Yeah.

Denis Scott (20:54)

There's discounts, there's not dis it's really hard. and so that's why we we create that view for customers to really understand that.

Alan Rudolph (21:00)

Thank

you, Mark.

Mark Petruzzi (21:01)

Good good stuff. yeah, let's finish up episode one here with topic three. and that is Inside Scout, what enterprise AI usage data actually reveals. So when a leadership team sees the organizational AI usage data for the first time, what's the thing that surprises them most, other than they have token spend? That always surprises them, and that's

Denis Scott (21:26)

Right.

Mark Petruzzi (21:27)

usually not good news.

And then really what are the gems that they're finding in in the the having that data for the first time as well?

Denis Scott (21:34)

Yeah, I think there's two things that really jump out at me. One is, and again, this speaks to the horizontal nature of what we've built, is I think a lot of leadership teams think about AI and often naturally think about engineers and developers, And they're the ones using AI, coding has changed. and that is a very true story. And those teams are often your heavy users.

But when you look horizontally across teams, it's people teams, it's marketing teams, it's finance

teams, and then

Alan Rudolph (22:01)

Mm-hmm.

Denis Scott (22:03)

starting to to really understand, geez, AI is really being used across my organizations, And so I think that's one of the eye-openers is is really what their true adoption is. The second thing that we often see with the adoption piece is we score that proficiency. And we do that based on how it's being used and also within.

within these workflows, how that how effective it is. And you will actually find there are teams that you didn't think about outside of engineering that are are quite advanced at times. And then you'll have the opposite, which is is more the challenge is like, geez, that team really doesn't know how to use this tool, which is is fair quite honestly. They they've never really been enabled or learned or how do I do this? And they're using it because they were told they had to, right. And so

That often becomes some of our first conversations. And then the second piece that really jumps out as well is just and we spoke to this a little bit earlier of like I had no idea this many tools were being used. And that's probably the eye-opener. I think most organizations and most customers we talk to think they have a, and they do have a relatively good grasp of the heavy usage tools. It's the kind of long tail, like if you think about

search queries back in the day. It's like, yeah, I understand really kind of those big terms, but it's like all these other long tail terms that are ending up driving things to my site. We see that with AI. What is what is the long tail of AI tools across your business? and often those are unauthorized and that that's okay. Like we're not saying that's a good or bad thing. We just want to identify it. And those might be some of your most

Proficient users are the ones actually adding tools because they're keeping up with the the newest platforms or or what they could be doing differently in their roles. And so we don't want to discourage that. We just want to identify it because organizations don't see that.

Alan Rudolph (23:51)

Got it. So as we talk about the gap between the teams that are super AI efficient, And fluent in terms of how to which tools to pick, how to use tools, et cetera, versus the teams that, they log in because they check a box, they need to say they're AI efficient. How big is that gap in practice? What separates the two? Like can can the tool actually, help us

digest and sort of that A where are we in that trend line in terms of AI fluency?

Denis Scott (24:21)

Yeah, we just actually, it's a great question, Alan. We just actually were looking at data around engineering, because we've had engineers on our platform the longest. So that's kind of the longest

Alan Rudolph (24:31)

Mm-hmm.

Denis Scott (24:32)

we can look at. And overall we've seen engineering output basically increase one and a half times over what it used to be, right? And

Alan Rudolph (24:39)

Okay.

Denis Scott (24:40)

this is this is based around adopted good code.

And what we see is kind of our P90 users, who we score as the highest, most proficient users, are actually driving that. We've seen them actually get more effective and efficient at a two and a half times clip, And so what happens with that is well, if you're doing that math, actually our lowest quartile, the folks that are are sort of the least proficient in in how we score it, actually haven't moved at all. Now you would have thought the whole curve moved up.

But it we've kind of talked about. I don't know if it's the right phrase, but the idea is like the rich are getting richer, like the top

Mark Petruzzi (25:14)

So

Denis Scott (25:15)

P90 group is actually getting more and more effective and really understanding these tools. And, as the new models come out, they're knowing when to use it, when not, All of those aspects. Whereas that sort of bottom quartile hasn't moved at all over time. And so

Alan Rudolph (25:30)

Yeah. Got it.

Denis Scott (25:31)

that

That gets back to this kind of enablement idea, Like how are we training teams and how do we take our best, most effective AI champions and have them sort of train and teach the others in the org?

Alan Rudolph (25:42)

Got it.

Mark Petruzzi (25:42)

what Dennis just described about measuring AI impact is exactly the conversation we're having inside our P advisory practice every day and our our AI to ROI group as well. So and that's tying AI adoption directly to EBITDA multiple.

Multiples at exit. This allows companies to take in board ready results. There's no long-term commitment required to start from an AGS perspective. And learn more at get-ags.com slash P advisory. And look for us next week for part two with Dennis.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

General Episode Description:

In this episode of Selling Intelligence, Lance Haffner, Chief Revenue Officer at Papaya Global, returns to discuss one of the biggest challenges facing modern revenue leaders: creating demand for problems buyers do not yet recognize. He shares practical strategies for validating market fit, identifying the right buyer personas, building effective sales processes, and knowing when it’s time to pivot.

The conversation also explores the growing trust deficit created by AI in sales. Lance explains why AI should enhance, not replace, human interactions, how revenue teams can use AI to improve forecasting and sales execution, and why speed, simplicity, and transparency are becoming essential competitive advantages. Finally, he shares leadership lessons from building a CRO organization from the ground up and the timeless sales disciplines every revenue leader should never overlook.

What You’ll Learn:

• How to create demand when buyers don’t yet recognize the problem they have
• Why validating market fit should come before scaling go to market efforts
• The importance of identifying the right buyer persona before refining messaging
• How continuous feedback loops help improve sales messaging and execution
• Why AI should remove friction instead of replacing human relationships
• Practical ways AI improves forecasting, pipeline management, and coaching
• How to recognize when a go to market strategy needs to change
• Leadership principles for building high performing revenue organizations from scratch

Key Topics:

• Creating new market demand
• Market fit validation
• Buyer persona strategy
• Sales methodology and discovery
• Revenue operations feedback loops
• AI enabled sales execution
• Building trust in an AI driven buying environment
• Pipeline management and forecasting
• Revenue leadership
• CRO best practices
• Customer experience
• Sales process optimization

Guest Spotlight: Lance Haffner

Lance Haffner is the Chief Revenue Officer at Papaya Global, where he leads the company’s global revenue organization through its next phase of growth. With leadership experience spanning staffing, HR technology, and enterprise SaaS, Lance is known for building scalable revenue functions, applying data driven decision making, and combining AI with disciplined sales execution to accelerate growth.

Resources & Mentions:

• Papaya Global
• Scott Kirby, CEO of United Airlines
• AI enabled sales organizations
• Revenue Operations
• Sales methodologies including SPICED and Challenger

🎧 Listen now and follow Selling Intelligence for more conversations with today’s leading revenue executives, sales innovators, and GTM operators. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Mark Petruzzi (00:36)

Welcome back to Selling Intelligence. I'm Mark Petruzzi.

KK Anderson (00:40)

And I'm KK Anderson. This is part two with Lance Hafner, Chief Revenue Officer at Papaya Global. Be sure to go back and listen to part But if you want to start here, let us bring you quickly up to speed. Lance told us how he has moved from staffing sales into HR and then into revenue leadership by applying a business enablement mindset where he wherever he sat and what it's taken to build papaya's first ever CRO function.

While the company shifts from years of product investment into a scale up phase.

Mark Petruzzi (01:12)

In part two, we get into how Lance is building demand for a problem most buyers don't know they have yet, the trust deficit. Lance is watching this show up directly into his AI enabled sales motion. And we'll go into and we'll analyze how he uses AI day in and day out to diagnose what's actually happening inside his sales team. Lance, welcome back.

Lance Haffner (01:36)

Thanks, Laura. Thanks, KK. Happy to be here again.

Mark Petruzzi (01:39)

Great. So yeah, let's jump into creating demand for a problem buyers do not know they have. you've compared the awareness problem you're facing to introducing a genuinely new category. How do you build go-to-market motion around the pain point most buyers don't even know they have yet?

Lance Haffner (01:56)

This is such a great question. And and it's it's it's been salient a few times in my my career. if you look back over the years and you look back at the new we as consumers, things that have been launched in the consumer market. I remember this this thing in in two thousand and six, seven, Apple releases the iPhone and we didn't even know we needed a handheld computer device that didn't have keys. In fact, it was absurd to think about it.

I was a Blackberry fan to be honest, and I wanted my keys and I resisted for two years.

Mark Petruzzi (02:26)

Ha ha

KK Anderson (02:28)

Was it clipped on your belt, Lance? Did you have it clipped on your belt?

Lance Haffner (02:32)

I look, I may have had a clip. Yes, I may have had a clip. yeah. I mean look, we can go

Mark Petruzzi (02:36)

I'm not gonna admit to that, Lance.

KK Anderson (02:38)

yes you are.

Lance Haffner (02:39)

back to you, we can go back to the days you had the pager clipped, right? Not less, yeah, or

Mark Petruzzi (02:42)

Yeah, yeah.

Lance Haffner (02:43)

the mo onto

KK Anderson (02:43)

Yeah.

Lance Haffner (02:44)

the Motorola Razor, onto the Blackberry telephone. But I know it's a consumer, that's really a consumer application review, but this the

Point still stands. We didn't know that we needed that. It's like we actually, in fact, some people took the antithesis side, the antithetical side of I hate keys, I don't want them. Not only do I not need it, is it not a pain? I don't want it. And so I think lots of CROs and businesses deal with this. You're it you're entering market with a new product. I want to be clear, sometimes it's not a new product. I, you know, in a prior job, it wasn't a new product, but it was a new application of that solution in market. but it's the same.

Right? Whether it's new or not, it's the same. you're dealing with with the problem of of market awareness and creating that demand. So first and foremost, I think coming back up to my, in our prior conversation, when I talked about moving from moving into scale, make sure market fit exists. Even if people aren't aware they have pain, make sure you got a market fit fit. You're dealing with the insights

KK Anderson (03:40)

Right.

Lance Haffner (03:40)

RevOps leader's creating, your Markovs leader who should who's likely.

According to RevOps, the insights your product team has, particularly your product marketing team who's done the research, competitive analysis. They're reading, the analysts and seeing what the analysts are saying about you in market, about other solutions. Do you got the market fit? Let's agree that you do. You've done the analysis. There's not just a TAM, but ultimately you have some serviceable, addressable market that you can actually sell that product into. All right.

That's point number one. Don't go off the gut thesis. I try to do it all the time. I gotta be honest. I'm preaching to myself here. We we get a thesis, we have bias on that thesis, and then we go look for everything to confirm the bias. No. Go look at the data and confirm that you actually have market fit and you actually have a market that you can sell, that you can service, and that you can obtain, and you can be successful successful. Number one. Number two, I you know.

If anyone can figure out how to make it really successful, a product or a pain that people don't know they need or have a pain they don't know they have, they're gonna be wealthy. by the way, people have done that. And they are, they were very wealthy. So but I don't think

KK Anderson (04:42)

Ha ha ha.

Lance Haffner (04:44)

it's it's not easy. we one of my leaders, another colleague, I have the fish, the fish can't climb the tree colleague who's who's brilliant sells mine. And another one says, Lance, I call this normalized power.

Having a conversation with the buyer, I'm going through my methodology process, I'm listening for the signals, and they just don't know they have pain. and I go back to the Apple versus BlackBerry method. None of us knew we had pain. In fact, it we had maybe an antithetical view of it. Not only do I not have pain, it sounds painful to go to a screen without prescribed buttons that are, can be precise. So so there's there's this normalized pain that exists.

I think the key to getting through that is two things. One, you've got the right buyer persona. sometimes go back to my example of where you have a product and market. It's not a new product and market, but maybe it's a new application, new go-to-market motion. We're thinking of it differently and how the buyer can apply that. who is the buyer though? Because the buyer might have shifted. Formerly, you might have been working with the HR department.

Now you're in finance and you're particularly a layer down in

KK Anderson (05:45)

Right.

Lance Haffner (05:45)

finance, maybe with treasury. Do you have the right buyer persona? Because if you don't, you have zero chance of helping them see the pain that they're that they they have. Okay, number one. So be dogged about landing on the right buyer persona and let that feedback loop happen. Listen to the sales calls, receive the sales feedback. Why am I not converting? Why am I disqualifying? Listen, watch, and be hyper quick.

On pivoting. Go back to the bow tie we talked about, right? You're all on top of funnel here going through your sales stages. Your RevOps leader is acutely watching this and giving you real-time feedback and you're shifting. Could be your campaign in market right now and the pitch in the campaign. Could be a lot of things, right? But you're watching. And then lastly, I would say the process itself, and I already mentioned it, but the sales process you're going through has to be spot on because the process is there to help them identify the pain.

Now, for 80 foot percent of what we sell, they know the pain. So it's easy. We know the pain before we go in generally, but we get that out of them through our sales process, whatever methodology you're using. I've used Spice by Winnie our friends at Winnie My Design, so roll out that in my last

KK Anderson (06:50)

Mm-hmm.

Lance Haffner (06:51)

job, but but Matic Challenger, whatever you're using, right? Go through that pain process, and there, right, right, is in my opinion, kind of the inflection point of them understanding that they actually do have the pain. And

and that's the hardest piece to get through. So let me let me headline that just quickly because I said a lot of words. Do you have right market fit? Using the insights from your analysis through RevOps, marketing ops, through product marketing. don't have bias confirmation. Many of us want to believe, this is great. Let's go sell this. Let's apply this this way. Prove that out. Don't have bias confirmation. Come down here, think about your sales process.

think through buyer persona. Are you are you now with the right buyer within the organization? And do you have the right pitch through pain or through your methodology? Excuse me, are you getting them through the pain process and helping them identify? And you and you have feedback loops that are telling you very quickly, real time, is it working or is it not? And you're pivoting. And by the way, I'm gonna say

KK Anderson (07:43)

Mm. Love that.

Lance Haffner (07:44)

this last thing. This is gonna be hard for me to say. Give up when when you're done. When the data tells you.

This isn't working. Stop investing resources because you're burning, you're burning money, you're burning funds, you're burning resources and opportunity of other things you can be selling. And I think that's a really

KK Anderson (07:59)

Right.

Lance Haffner (08:00)

important note here is then it's time to probably say, we tried this, it didn't work, let's close the book on it. And that's really hard for a guy like me to say.

KK Anderson (08:08)

Right. we have this, you know, I've been teaching this philosophy for, over a decade now. and I call it the two sale mentality. And that is that every sale, I don't care if you're selling Girl Scut cookies or you're selling multi-million dollar software, it's two sales. The first sale is getting your customer to articulate why they need to change. And the second sale is why you and why now. And so

It occurs to me as I listen to you speak, Lance, that that's exactly what you're doing when you're selling to someone who doesn't know they have a problem yet, their eyes haven't been open, you have to really nail that first sale and pull the pane. And once you get that, then you can go into, why papaya and why now?

Lance Haffner (08:48)

Why Papaya and why not? I love it, yeah. I love it. Okay.

KK Anderson (08:52)

okay, so yeah, and do you feel like your sales team is good at doing that? So as far as like selling value to something that they don't know that they need, like I think you're you nailed it when you talked about the sales process, but it really is everything, doing it in the right order.

Lance Haffner (09:06)

everything. Yeah. It is everything. And yes, I think so. I think look, I'm biased. I think I've got some extraordinary sellers and I think they really do

KK Anderson (09:13)

Right.

Lance Haffner (09:14)

care. Like let's let's maybe go to the we've been talking in kind of a technical manner, but let's go to our people. Yeah, I think they care and I think they do understand. Certainly they're motivated, they're sellers, but I think the best sellers do care about the value they can bring their customer. And I think that shows up in the processes they employ and the methods.

They use to work through the sales process. So it's not just about identifying the pain. It's about I have conviction that I can help you. And this solution can save you time, it can save you money, whatever, whatever the value prop is. And and so yeah, I think my sellers are doing. I think they're fantastic, and I think they see they see the vision. And frankly, some of them are leading us, right? I've got some great sellers leading us, giving us market insights that we then back through process, very quickly take that in, the feedback loop.

and iterate

KK Anderson (09:59)

Mm-hmm.

Lance Haffner (10:00)

w what we need to iterate to to help them be successful.

KK Anderson (10:03)

It's all about the loop.

Mark Petruzzi (10:04)

Beautiful.

Lance Haffner (10:06)

It's all about the lube.

Mark Petruzzi (10:08)

Lance, what tells you that the messaging is actually starting to land in the market? What what tools

Lance Haffner (10:13)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (10:14)

and what approaches do you look at to really understand that?

Lance Haffner (10:17)

Yeah, don't overthink this. I think I'm an Occam's Razor fan, another colleague who brought that to me. Usually, the

simplest answer is the right answer. if you Mark, going back to what we started the call with, or as we talked about the CRO function, those insights will show up pretty quickly. now they may not be they're they're going to tell you a variety of things that may not be overly structural in nature, but if you have your system set up.

From top of funnel through closed loss through to activation through retention. Go there. Remember the bow tie and to KK's point. We may have a really good sales process and pitch. We don't have market fit just yet, but man, the pitch sells it and we get it in, we install, but yet we turn six months later. That's no good. Those insights are telling you, they're giving you real-time feedback. So your question is, how do I know the map the message is working? Start at top of funnel. I can see the outbound scripts are working and that we are qualifying.

leads. They are becoming opportunities. I can see the same in in lead gen and in marketing. But I can see in the SDR outbound motions. I'm producing Topafuna pipeline. Number one. Number two, I'm converting that pipeline. It's happening. And this is all again, Mark, real time set up through your systems and processes and your sell stack and your insights coming from your revenue. Obviously, here. I do want to say this, it has to be bifurcated a bit. Bifurcated's maybe the wrong

It has to be highlighted. You kind of have to have a bit of a tiger element about this, that you're watching it discreetly, explicitly. If you're not, then it can kind of get it, it can get in the overall noise of the funnel and your insights and your data and the pipeline management. So make sure you've got it set out separately. But if you got the right structure in place, you are going the key, the simple key. You're going to get those insights immediately, and then you can pivot. And ultimately, back to I love KK taking us through the other side of the funnel.

If I'm beginning to turn, turn, churn, okay, man, it's working up here, great, but I'm an ARR business and my churn is is not good. And so we may have to go back to the drawing board and rethink market fit, product design, whatever. I C P

KK Anderson (12:11)

I C P, yeah. Yeah.

Lance Haffner (12:13)

all of it. Yeah.

KK Anderson (12:15)

Okay, let's move into talking about the trust trust deficit, you know, that

Lance Haffner (12:20)

Yeah.

KK Anderson (12:20)

we are all in right now with our AI enabled sales motion. And, you we talked about this when we when we met in our in our prep call and how, we're in a world where buyers aren't always sure that like they're even dealing with a real person anymore, right? that someone actually wrote a human actually wrote their email. that

It's even a real person on the phone that's calling them. And so how does that show up in your world and what do you do about it?

Lance Haffner (12:46)

Yeah, you all had a podcast on this a month or two ago that was really good that I listened to and kind of informed and influenced some of my thinking. Yeah, I made a call the other day. I won't give you the company I call, but I'm a customer and and it was a small company by the way, local to me. So service provider for my home. We'll just say, mechanical stuff in your home. And I needed to get the tech back out and I call and I hear this voice, it's like, Hey, Lance, thanks for calling.

And I said, yes, thanks. Yep, lights after calling from da da da da da and about da da da. And then there's like the four second pause. Great, thanks for calling in about that today. I'm like,

Mark Petruzzi (13:22)

Ha ha ha

ha.

Lance Haffner (13:23)

I was so excited. I got a call almost immediately. It sounded real. And then I'm like, you're not real. You're not real.

So it's showing up everywhere in our lives. And and then bring it apply it in our business. you had said on this last podcast, we've had automations out for a while, marketing automations that see the signals and they respond. And so this isn't new, but it is it is exponentially.

My opinion is this. I think I think we we need to be we should be using the technology. It makes us more efficient, and if we can get it right, it will improve the customer's life. It will, it absolutely will. I believe that. Had that system, in my example, me calling the tech back out, been as responsive and and conversational as a human being and ultimately got me through the process efficiently, I just I wouldn't have cared. I wouldn't have, as long as the outcome

was what it needed to be. So that's my opinion. The outcomes need to get to where they are. I think we've got to be smart about how we apply AI and the automations within our business. Again, automations have been around a long time, all through the funnel, even in the sales process. We set up sequences that are automated, that are managed by our CRMs and our outreach systems for our sellers that are not a seller necessarily, right? And so so they've existed for a long time. They've just become very dynamic and agentic.

Because the agents can can work. So I think we've got to perfect the processes. I don't think we resist. I think we bring them in, we perfect the processes. I also, this is an interesting thing. I don't think you necessarily deny the fact that it is that you're using AI. I think it's okay. I think people can be okay with it.

Mark Petruzzi (14:56)

Well, Lance, I even go a step further with some of this when when I make those calls like you do and I hear an AI person on the phone, I'm actually happy sometimes because I know that I'm just gonna get through this faster. If it's a good AI, right? It's gotta be done right. But I'm looking at this and saying, Wow, I'm not gonna get put on hold for I'll be back to you in three minutes. I'll be back to you in three minutes. That's what humans tend to do with us.

and I don't know if they're just taking a break in between or if they their computer systems are so slow, but AI is so fast that they come back and they say, Okay, give me ten seconds and I'll have an answer for you and I like that. So you've you've said that th nowadays the sales motion shouldn't be a AI, just AI, and certainly shouldn't just be human led as well. It's gotta be both.

Lance Haffner (15:50)

Gotta be both. Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (15:50)

So yep, and

it's gotta be what so where do you draw the line on what

Lance Haffner (15:55)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (15:55)

has to stay human within your sales motion?

Lance Haffner (15:58)

Yeah. Well, like I want to relate this to Papaya and Papaya Global and our really how our our North Star and our vision. our vision is you'll never work alone. And we embrace artificial intelligence and our ability to build it into our product and solution and enable our people and our customers to be successful. So whether it enables our people to serve our customer or it enables our customer to serve themselves, the nexus of human and

And artificial intelligence technology is where Papaya sits, particularly in workforce. Just take that philosophy and apply it to your revenue organization. And and that internal facing, this isn't really a customer or a deficit of trust as it relates to AI, but maybe I'm moving internal to say, look, I become we can become so efficient in pipeline analysis and forecasting with the intelligence going out and looking at our population.

one in a former job I dropped all my calls into CRM out there that everyone loves. I won't name but and I got insights within about five minutes. Thousands of calls across twelve months. And I had immediate insights about my sales process, my pitches, what's happening, why am I close losing, where where are we going right in close one? Predictive forecasting, there's so many tools, AI tools we have today at our fingertips. We have never been more efficient or productive. This

As CROs. Pivot back to the customer. Mark, yes, let's embrace it. Let's not deny the fact that we're using it. We're using it, buyer, to make your journey frictionless, better, more expeditious. Speed and simplicity are what are the two most fundamental, basic, foundational things needed for sales success, in my opinion. We forget about them all the time. We can use AI to remove friction from the process, to expedite the process, and to make it simple. And our customers, our buyers, will embrace that.

Since we're in that clunky phase right now. We're trying to normalize what it looks like and how it feels. And there's the whole scary element of AIT right out there that I think people get.

Mark Petruzzi (17:54)

Cool stuff. All right. Well, this has been really great, Lance. we'd like to close up with a really quick rapid fire section. it's

Lance Haffner (18:02)

Let's do it.

Mark Petruzzi (18:03)

KK's favorite part of this this whole podcast. So first question for you, what was the first product or service you ever sold?

Lance Haffner (18:12)

Yeah, I did tell you all in in when we talked the first time and you mentioned it on our last podcast. I did sell staffing solutions, Headhunter. that was really my first first job. But before that, for about six months, I did get my real estate license and I attempted to sell real estate. I sold one house in six months, and I had a I remember I'll never forget my first and last buyer said, Hey, how old are you? I'm like, Yeah, I'm 19. have you ever bought a have you ever bought a house? I'm like,

Nope. And that was the last whole house I ever sold, so.

Mark Petruzzi (18:41)

Lance,

that is such a story and I have the same mirror of a story for you. I

Lance Haffner (18:46)

De

Mark Petruzzi (18:47)

did it I bet you I was eighteen, probably a freshman in college,

Lance Haffner (18:50)

Uh-huh.

Mark Petruzzi (18:52)

eighteen or nineteen. I did it for about six months. I actually sold one as well, so it was nice to get that that commission. But then I looked at and said, Yeah, I think I need to get a little older before I come back to this and never did.

Lance Haffner (19:07)

I'm out. Exactly. We're kindred spirits smart. Yeah.

KK Anderson (19:09)

That's

Mark Petruzzi (19:09)

That's

KK Anderson (19:10)

funny. Okay,

Mark Petruzzi (19:10)

beautiful.

KK Anderson (19:11)

Lance, who is your favorite CRO or CEO that you like to follow?

Lance Haffner (19:15)

Yeah, my favorite right now is Scott Kirby, CEO of United Airlines. great turnaround story at United. I happen to be a United customer. I fly a lot, so I've got the premier 1K status. But set my status status aside, of course, my experience with United is always going be great. should be. and by the way, every customer's experience should be good, irrespective of the premium statuses. But I'll say this.

He came in, he acknowledged that United's service network products suffered and hadn't hadn't been going the way that the board nor he nor the customers want. And he has changed United's trajectory. I have great, he's just kind of a real guy too. Own it, be open

KK Anderson (19:52)

Yeah.

Lance Haffner (19:52)

about it, and that's what I like about Scott.

KK Anderson (19:54)

All right, shout out to Scott

Mark Petruzzi (19:55)

Very cool.

KK Anderson (19:56)

Scott Kirby.

Mark Petruzzi (19:57)

so okay, leadership or go to market practice, every sales and marketing leader should adopt.

Lance Haffner (20:03)

Don't forget the basics. in the end, this is about some of the fundamental things, pipeline management, rigor, and discipline in your process. We CROs especially get caught up in in, I don't want to say the clouds, but the strategy and ensuring and keeping our vision grand and large and overlooking the entire org as we should. I also still have a weekly pipeline review every week.

So the basics to any leader, not just revenue leaders.

KK Anderson (20:29)

My favorite question, Lance, and I was gonna say advice you would give your twenty one year old self, but maybe I should say nineteen year old self selling real estate.

Lance Haffner (20:36)

my gosh, so many things. relax, everything will be okay. I was high strung and I looked it up even when I had my own business. like if I had if I lost a deal, I was so devastated. And I just look back and say, relax, it's okay. I mean, you're gonna be okay. That's what that's what this gray gives you is that that that comfort to know it's gonna be okay because you have been through those things. That'd be my advice.

Mark Petruzzi (21:00)

Beautiful. Lance, so thank you so much for the clarity you bring to all of this. particularly the vantage point of being of the unconventional path into the CROC. You know, what it takes to build a revenue function from nothing and what AI actually looks like in the hands of an operator using it well every day. Where should people go to find your work?

Lance Haffner (21:21)

Yeah, so look, find us at papayaglobal.com. You can find me on LinkedIn. I think my handles are Lance Hafner, or just search Lance Hafner and Papaya Global. You'll find me on the Papaya Global website. You'll find me on LinkedIn. Reach out. I love I'd love to to to to connect with other thought leaders. I'd love to debate someone who who believes differently. I love that. for sure. I'm an Aries, so I'm a bit of a fiery debater. But I have loved my time and enjoy my time with you all.

I'll put a plug-in for the podcast. I think I think it's it's the thought leaders you bring on, the ideas you think about. I think what I love most, it's very diverse. You have you have leaders and thoughts from all across the spectrum on how they think about this. And there's nothing richer than to hear different views and perspectives that I can build into my own practice. So thank you for having me on and for producing this podcast.

KK Anderson (22:10)

Well, thank you, Lance. That that is encouraging to hear. And that's our goal. So hearing it straight from you, our, you know, ideal audience is is who you are. And that means a lot. And we'll put all of that in the show notes as far as your LinkedIn profile and how they can reach you. And to our audience, if what Lance said about building a revenue function from the ground up is sitting with you, that is the work we do at AGS.

And particularly inside the two millimeter club, which is a small group coaching residency for frontline sales leaders where they learn to identify and coach the small shifts in seller behavior that add up to exponential movement in pipeline. We have eight-week cohorts designed to help sales leaders find more business and win more business. Cohorts launch monthly, and you can apply on our website at get-ags.com.

Mark Petruzzi (23:02)

Great. And if this conversation was useful, please send it to a leader on your team who needs it most or a friend, former colleague as well. I am Mark Petruzzi.

KK Anderson (23:12)

And I'm KK Anderson and this is Selling Intelligence and we will see you next time.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

General Description:

The path to becoming a Chief Revenue Officer doesn’t always begin in sales. In this episode of Selling Intelligence, Lance Haffner, Chief Revenue Officer at Papaya Global, shares how an unconventional career through staffing, recruiting, and HR prepared him to lead one of the most important functions inside a modern SaaS company.

Lance explains why great revenue leaders must think like business operators first and sales leaders second. Drawing on his experience as Papaya Global’s first CRO, he discusses how understanding talent, operations, and organizational strategy creates a stronger foundation for scaling revenue than focusing on sales alone.

The conversation also explores the evolution of the CRO role, why today’s revenue leaders must oversee the entire revenue bow tie instead of just the sales funnel, and how Revenue Operations has become one of the most strategic functions in modern go-to-market organizations. Lance shares practical insights on aligning marketing, sales, customer success, and product while avoiding common scaling mistakes as companies expand into new markets.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why some of the best CROs come from unconventional career paths
• How an HR background can create stronger business leaders
• The difference between managing sales and leading revenue
• Why the modern CRO owns the entire revenue lifecycle
• How the revenue bow tie changes the way organizations scale
• Why Revenue Operations has become the CRO’s most strategic partner
• How to identify gaps across the entire customer journey
• Best practices for expanding into enterprise, mid-market, and SMB segments
• Why every go-to-market motion requires its own operating model
• How product, marketing, sales, and customer success must work together to drive growth

Key Topics:

• Chief Revenue Officer responsibilities
• From HR to CRO
• Business-first leadership
• Strategic HR
• Revenue bow tie
• Revenue Operations
• Sales and marketing alignment
• Customer lifecycle management
• SaaS revenue strategy
• Enterprise sales
• Mid-market expansion
• SMB go-to-market strategy
• Product marketing
• Market segmentation
• Revenue growth
• Organizational design
• Scaling SaaS companies
• Papaya Global

Guest:

Lance Haffner is Chief Revenue Officer at Papaya Global, where he leads the company’s global revenue organization. Before becoming CRO, Lance built his career across staffing, recruiting, HR leadership, general management, and revenue operations. His unique perspective allows him to connect talent strategy, business operations, and revenue growth into a unified go-to-market approach that helps organizations scale more effectively.

Resources Mentioned:

• Papaya Global
• Revenue Bow Tie Framework
• Revenue Operations
• Product Marketing
• Enterprise SaaS
• Customer Success
• Two Millimeter Club

#SellingIntelligence #RevenueLeadership #ChiefRevenueOfficer #RevenueOperations #B2BSales

Mark Petruzzi (00:29)

Welcome to Selling Intelligence. This is the full conversation with Lance Hafner, Chief Revenue Officer at Papaya Global. We have broken it into chapters in the description. Take it from the top or jump into the segment most relevant to where you are today. Enjoy the show.

Welcome to Selling Intelligence. I'm Mark Petruzzi.

KK Anderson (00:51)

And I'm KK Anderson.

Mark Petruzzi (00:53)

Most people who end up running revenue for a company came up through sales. Our guest today didn't. He started in staffing and headhunting, crossed into HR, and built his way into the C suite from a function most operators treat as compliance, not growth.

KK Anderson (01:10)

Lance Hafner is Chief Revenue Officer at Papaya Global, a global payroll and workforce payments platform, where he's the first person ever to hold that title. Before Papaya, he ran general management and then revenue for a large payments and payroll business. After building his early career full cycle and staffing sales, he's also one of the most hands-on AI users we've talked to on this show, using it daily.

To diagnose his own sales team's performance, Lance, welcome to Selling Intelligence.

Lance Haffner (01:41)

Thanks, KK Mark. Happy to be here.

KK Anderson (01:43)

We are thrilled to have you. Let's let's dive right into our first topic and would love to learn about your journey from HR to CRO, which is certainly an unconventional path for the C suite. And you started in staffing and headhunting sales, moved into HR, you ended up running revenue for large business units. What's kind of the through line between those roles that

You didn't see at the time you were on the journey, but when you look back now you can see it clearly.

Lance Haffner (02:12)

Yes, yes. So great question. And thanks again for having me today. I like to say when people see my HR background in my profile or we're having, a conversation, the us I would say eighty percent are a bit shocked, but to your point, unconventional. You're an enigma, Lance, and I agree with that. you don't you don't see it. But there are a few of us out there, we exist. so I as you said, I cut my teeth in in staffing.

And so my my colleagues who are staffing, head hunting, recruiting, outsourcing my hats off.

And back then we didn't call it SDR, but I was an SDR and made my way into account executive. Where to your point, full cycle AE, although I did have the SDR, I qualified a lot of my own and took that from top of funnel through through close one. And even working through to make sure my my recruits started, my recruits stayed, and I got my fee. So even through maybe activation back then as well.

But and that led to an entrepreneurship role, which was great. I loved it. That was also very sales focused and continuing the staffing theme. but like a lot of young entrepreneurs and small businesses, it scaled up very quickly, it scaled down very quickly. and I found myself wanting to go back to work. So I did. And I went back in recruiting client side, and recruiting sits in HR. So that's really the nexus of my kind of staffing sales beginning roots to HR.

And then I turned into an HR career that I decided I loved the discipline, I loved it for a variety of reasons. But one of the things that compelled me most is I saw a lot of compliance HR, which by the way, I don't want to discount that. it's required, we need it, it's important. But I also saw the need for strategic HR, particularly how does it enable the business to grow? Which is a bit of a, if we're all if we're being honest here, folks, that hey, I'm a strategic HR professional, I want to sit at the table and I want to enable the business to grow.

You hear that all the time from HR pros. How do you actually make it happen? And I think I found my way into making it happen. And and that was that was kind of the path to HR. Any questions, comments? I'll pivot over to the how how that move into revenue and sales.

Mark Petruzzi (04:13)

Yeah, well, it's I mean, you and I have had this discussion already in the past, Lance, and the idea of coming from these unconventional or less conventional paths, I immediately reacted to that by saying, Wow, some of the best CROs that I know out there today have come from that kind of unconventional path.

Lance Haffner (04:34)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (04:34)

So I don't think that means you don't, you shouldn't go into sales if that's what you want to do.

But I think that means you really have to understand, everything in an organization. You have to look at it as a business person, not just a salesperson. And when you do that and you grow throughout your career, you typically turn into a a great CRO.

Lance Haffner (04:58)

yeah. Mark, hey, Kim, let me tag on that. I love it because I think we're gonna talk about this a bit later, about the CRO function itself and building it from scratch. Look, go back to that HR role and I wanna visualize something you just said that I think is important. I actually my mantra for my team and I was we are business professionals who do HR. And that that very simple statement was to kind of demonstrate, visualize this. We are not HR pros, although we are, let's be honest.

We are business professionals, members of this business who are here to achieve the business's objective. And we will do that through our HR practice. Whether we're ensuring governance and compliance, whether we're ensuring total rewards, compensation, benefits are competitive, whether we're ensuring we're bringing talent in, acquiring it, developing it, whether we're ensuring that the C-suite as an HR pro you are workforce management strategies and everything you're doing propels the business through its people.

You're taking your your lens of that discipline and applying it to business growth. No different than the CRO. you are a business professional pro executive who has to grow the business through the functions of sales, marketing, revenue operations, et cetera.

Mark Petruzzi (06:01)

Excellent. All right. So you've talked about bringing a business enablement mindset to HR instead of that old compliance mindset. So tell us a little more, take us a little deeper into what did that what did that actually look like in practice? And how did it change how your business partners saw the function? And again, we could touch on this, we don't have to go deep, and then really transition it into how do you take those mindsets.

and bring it into the CRO role as well.

Lance Haffner (06:31)

Yeah, good good question. first and foremost, I already talked through the functions of HR generally. And it it can it can expand or or contract a bit, but the functions we talked through. and it's a vast discipline, right? You have you have professionals who come up and tell the rewards and do nothing else. you have professionals who come up in recruiting and stay there, et cetera, payroll, etc. and so I think the my perspective was this.

My business has an objective. It wants to grow revenue. It wants to expand in regions, whatever that's that North Star is and the objectives that they have to achieve to hit that North Star. And then I back into my HR function. And what most, what is most critical to hitting that? Well, in HR, generally it's going to be talent acquisition and development. Bring the right talent in, retain, develop them, retain them, because without the people, you can't do that.

Secondly, it's going to be workforce management. What does that mean? Well, so it's not just about bringing people in. That's sales, right? But let's talk about NHR, maybe the sales translation to segmentation coverage. Where do they go? How do they get there? What are their motions as professionals to achieve the objectives? How many engineers do I need? So that workforce management to ensure you've got, even though you have people coming in the door, those inputs are right, the right people, where you're placing them to achieve the objectives.

and by the way, in this one's fundamental but and simple but often missed by HR pros, understanding what the business does. There I hate to say it, but I think there's some some of my colleagues out there

KK Anderson (07:56)

Yeah.

Lance Haffner (07:57)

who don't fully understand their business. And they'll say to you, look, I'm an I'm an expert in ABC and total rewards and in recruiting or payroll. Great, and you should be. But I don't know. I can't I can't rationalize being the most

effective HR pro executive without understanding truly the basis of your business and what it does.

Mark Petruzzi (08:17)

Yeah, and Lance, that also

applies to the sales rep level, even the CRO level. There are there are people

Lance Haffner (08:23)

Exactly.

Mark Petruzzi (08:24)

there are people that are so into and focused on the craft of selling that they really don't truly understand what their in some ways

Lance Haffner (08:34)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (08:34)

what their product offering is and in other ways really why their company is successful.

Lance Haffner (08:39)

Mark, it's so right. How many times have you had a sales leader say, look, I can sell widgets, I can sell this, I can sell that? And there's almost this kind of implied, implicit, like it does I don't care what the business does. Now, depending on the context of that statement, it absolutely can be right. They're saying I know my craft and discipline and I can apply it anywhere. But some of them truly are like, yeah, I don't know, I don't care. I care about bringing the right, sales function. So I hear you, I totally.

KK Anderson (09:01)

So Lance, you are Papaya's first chief revenue officer. And it appears that you're shifting to a go-to market and a scale focus. So, so tell us about how you started. Like what did you have to build in

Lance Haffner (09:16)

Yeah.

KK Anderson (09:16)

your first few months that, a CRO walking into an established seat wouldn't necessarily have to think about? Like tell us about how that journey began for you.

Lance Haffner (09:25)

Yeah, thank you, KK. So let's can I maybe a little context and I'll I'll get to your

KK Anderson (09:29)

Sure.

Lance Haffner (09:30)

question. So I took my first CR role about four years ago, I think. and new to me as a CRO, I've been a GM president before that. So of course my remit of GM included revenue. but anyway, my point of being a a CRO as a first and even my last job was let's

Let's go understand exactly what the function and discipline of CRO is. What what does the revenue function represent And you really had this evolution over the past 20 to 25 years, particularly the Genesis being kind of SaaS and tech, right? And understanding that the B2B buyer is much different than it's ever been. And you need some function to bring the disparate revenue buckets or functions together, i.e. the revenue leader. So I had to go do some research.

And if I'm being honest, you're kind of like, why would you ever become the CRO if you're even having to research what the CRO does? And I think for a variety of reasons I got the opportunity, one being such that that the GM role I was pretty successful in and had demonstrated that as a GM, I was very revenue focused. So back to your I think that's important, right? What is a CRO? And by the way, let's define it. The CRO is responsible from really cradle to grave revenue. What is cradle to grave?

top of funnel and everything that's coming in funnel and the lead sources coming in top of funnel, bringing that through the funnel and pipeline to close one. By the way, that's that's that's marketing and growth up top of funnel, but also your sellers, your your SDRs, which could be growth down through your sales team, through conversion, and through activation and through retention. Let's and let's let's can we stop there for just a moment? A lot of folks when they when they discuss revenue,

A lot of sales leaders really, but even some revenue leaders they talk about the funnel, right? You visualize the funnel, and the funnel has an end in some revenues leaders' mind. That end is close one. Great. But really, I think conventional or contemporary CROs in the past five years have started to evolve that to the revenue bow tie. Pivot the funnel on its side, everything coming in from the left. your lead sources, SDR.

Growth inbound through marketing, lead gen, partners, self-source, whatever. I have a lead source that's coming through. I'm qualifying that lead into opportunity and I'm closing. and by the way, there's feedback loop there in the in the in the left side of the bow tie. Close one is center and great, but we're not done. We've got to activate revenue, particularly in an ARR business with SaaS, with with recurring revenue. We've got to expand it, we've got to retain it. And so I think the contemporary revenue function today.

may not own all of that, but they absolutely should have oversight and remit and coordinate the owners. And in some organizations, they do own all of those functions. I don't own all of them. I own a lot of them, but I don't. I am very much dependent on colleagues in the business. All right. Stop there. Anything there you all would add or debate me on?

Mark Petruzzi (12:21)

No, no debates. I think that's it's taking us further into the just your mindset and what you do every day. So you went from a role where marketing was only a dotted line into you to one

Lance Haffner (12:35)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (12:36)

where you now own the full function directly.

KK Anderson (12:39)

Uh-huh.

Mark Petruzzi (12:40)

and by the way, a little perspective on that. I worked with a lot of companies when the concept

was moving, particularly software companies where the concept was moving from, okay, like if I'm gonna take this revenue number, I need to own all this. And we didn't even

Lance Haffner (12:57)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (12:57)

call it the CRO yet, but

Lance Haffner (12:59)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (13:00)

it it then turned into that. And now we've gone full circle where there are a lot of CROs who don't own all the things that you own. They just they want

Lance Haffner (13:07)

They don't. Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (13:09)

the title, but they're really just a SVP of sales or a sales leader. So

What is having that full remit change the way you operate

Lance Haffner (13:17)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (13:18)

day to day?

Lance Haffner (13:19)

Yeah, yeah. So good question. And coming back, I love to I get a little verbose and digress. So thanks for corralling me back here and last selling back part. Yeah. So

Mark Petruzzi (13:26)

no, no worries.

KK Anderson (13:26)

Ha ha ha.

Lance Haffner (13:28)

building the CRO functions from scratch andor my remit every day. so here's the beauty of it, and you all know this. and my my colleagues out there know this. When those functions build themselves disparately, marketing, if sales can't sell, it's marketing's fault.

or sales can sell or excuse me, marketing can't qualify. the leads, sales saying, I can't I can't close your leads marketing, or if it's all SDR outbound motion, SDR, these are crap leads, you're not qualifying. Meanwhile, marketing is saying, Hey sales, you saw you can't close. I need closers and eat a lot of this. And by the way, you never get away from that. It's just kind of intrinsic and innate. and I kind of smile because we all deal with this every day.

But the CRO thinks about that in kind of this linear fashion. And they think about those gates from top of funnel all the way through to activation, continue through the gates of activation starting, expanding and retaining and preventing churn. Or if you have churn, fine, and then loop back. And that feedback loop coming under each of those, okay, loop back to why and return them. this is a product matter. Let's go over here. Why did we close go back up to top of funnel or left of bow tie?

So I'm thinking about that entire value chain, if you will. And where are the gaps? By the way, one thing I haven't said that is a huge miss on me at this point, and I can't believe I've not said it to all my RevOps pros out there. The current CR also is very much building the systems and processes that allow those functions that sit in that bow tie

KK Anderson (14:56)

Mm-hmm.

Lance Haffner (14:56)

to operate in the most efficient, effective way. I would say to you: no offense to my marketing colleagues, no offense to my sales colleagues.

I think the revenue ops leader has become the right hand of the CRO. And without that strong person, the CRO and his colleagues or those functions he owns, we are we're kind of steering a ship without without the ability to see or a plane or whatever metaphor you want to use there, but we're kind of driving blind. so every day I'm looking at the throughput of top of funnel through to activation, and I'm finding those gaps and I'm filling.

And sometimes those gaps come outside of revenue. I already mentioned one. If we're not closing, because let's say we have let's say it's a feature set, table stakes. I don't have it, we've lost it, the market's gone a different direction. I'm now immediately over with product. and we're having the discussion. Let's say actually product's perfect, but I've got some market fit issues because how we think about

The product in market and how our buyers think about it is off. All right, I'm back up here with product marketing having that conversation. Let's say, let's move to the other side. Now let's move over here to retention and churn. I have a service issue. Call, and we're not hitting SLAs to pick up the call, our automations aren't working well. Great. Now I'm dealing with ops. But my job is thinking about that entire bow tie and finding the

KK Anderson (16:11)

Mm-hmm.

Lance Haffner (16:11)

gaps and problems and then coordinating either within my own shop or externally to fill.

So that's that's kind of how I think about it in big picture. So back to

KK Anderson (16:19)

Right.

Lance Haffner (16:19)

your question, one last thing. I come in, what are we doing here? The first thing is survey the landscape, where are the functions built? By the way, the functions may be extraordinary. You may not have a lot of work to do within the discipline or the function.

Mark Petruzzi (16:32)

Yeah.

Lance Haffner (16:33)

Your job now is to connect it all, tie it together, align them, and ensure that things are working in concept in concert. So yeah.

KK Anderson (16:41)

And it's making sure we're big believers of Jocko's winning by design bow tie here at AGS. We talk about it all the time, right? Find we call

Lance Haffner (16:48)

Yes. Yes.

KK Anderson (16:50)

it find more, win more, keep more. Yes. I've got the same book right here.

Lance Haffner (16:52)

That's right. That's right.

Mark Petruzzi (16:53)

Yep, there you go. Huh.

KK Anderson (16:55)

yeah, and we talk about it in a lot of our episodes actually as well. but

Lance Haffner (16:59)

Yeah, I know.

KK Anderson (17:00)

that like the more overlap you can create and the tighter handshake you can create between the three segments, the better.

Right. And

Lance Haffner (17:07)

A hundred percent.

KK Anderson (17:08)

and you may be, you may, and this it also kind of goes into this diagnostic model. If you picture your bow tie and then the various metrics that your KPIs that your RevOps leader is

Lance Haffner (17:18)

Yep, yep.

KK Anderson (17:19)

pulling at each stage, you might be able, you might see something that's happening in FineMore up here on the left hand side of the top of the funnel that is

Lance Haffner (17:26)

Mm-hmm.

KK Anderson (17:27)

gonna signal, hey, in six months, you're gonna have an issue over here with retention because guess what?

You're not getting the right leads, they're not the right people,

Lance Haffner (17:33)

That's right.

KK Anderson (17:34)

they're not gonna stay, they're not gonna have the right, they're not gonna

Lance Haffner (17:36)

Yeah.

KK Anderson (17:37)

be the right fit for us, right? And so all of a sudden as CRO,

Lance Haffner (17:38)

Yep. That's right.

KK Anderson (17:40)

you see that and you can go back and mitigate and make tweaks there. So it's just it's fascinating.

Lance Haffner (17:43)

That's right. You did you did such a great job,

KK, of of maybe demonstrating that better than I. in a very simple manner. You're exactly right. that visibility and the systems and processes in place to move quickly and fix it when you see it. So

KK Anderson (17:58)

Right. Yep. So really good.

Mark Petruzzi (17:59)

All right. Well,

well, before we close up episode one, Lance, let me ask you to to go quickly into, shifting a company from the invest mode to a scale mode. no, you've done that a couple of times, few times in your career now. So the first question with that is how do you diversify your go to market motions across the typical markets that we deal with, enterprise, mid market?

Lance Haffner (18:23)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (18:24)

incubation groups and high fast growth organizations without losing focus on what's already working.

Lance Haffner (18:31)

my gosh, it's so salient for me, Mark. And every organization, particularly when they're looking to build the revenue function out or expand it or just overhaul it. This is one of the major discussion points. I would say we're really good at this. We're up market. We're selling this solution. It's enterprise. We've structured an organization around, particularly a revenue organization, around the enterprise motion. Great.

What else can we do? Because I look at it and I'm doing my analysis and I see the I see so much more opportunity. Where does that analysis start? I would say first first of all, you're you're meeting with product marketing and you're having a conversation about market fit, how they see the product. I like to think of the product marketers. this is probably the major wrong analogy, but I think of them as kind of the oracles of their product. they are they're close, they're the clo one of the closest to product, but they're also sitting in marketing, they're thinking about the market and

And so you're having that conversation with them and you're determining where are other opportunities, where do we have fit? And back to KK's point, you're not making a mistake in in introducing a new motion into a new segment, into a new region, that ultimately, while your sales pitch is great, you can convert those deals, you're gonna lose them later. So you do your you do your segmentation, you do your market analysis, where do I tan tan salmon sum? Where can I go after it?

And then what's my coverage? How am I segmenting? So back to your point. I've got a mid-market solution that's fantastic, but I don't have I have an enterprise motion, I have a SMB motion, and I miss the I miss the the the mid-market. By the way, we talk about motions all the time. I think it's a bit overused. but really when I say motion, obviously I visualize how that deal, lead, makes its way through top of funnel through the organization.

And how we've structured everything to accommodate that. It looks it can look different. SDR can be different. The ratio of SDRs to sellers can be different. Obviously, your Legion activities, your campaigns, where you're attaching those buyers, where you're excuse me, where you're touching those buyers, the signals that you're looking at, and then bring that on down through through sales.

an enterprise, absolutely, you're gonna have lots of sales engineering and solutions consulting and you're gonna engage. It's gonna be a long cycle process. In market, it starts to compress. And in SMB, frankly, you can have one day closes. Are you structured to allow for that? and the processes are diverse enough and robust enough to do it. And then lastly, here's another big mistake I think about, because I've made it.

one of my one of my colleagues says, a fish can't climb a tree. What he means by that is when I show up with a brilliant idea because I'm looking for revenue opportunities, I'm like, hey, you know these sellers in this line of business who are enterprise sellers and they're selling, five million dollars a year and they're probably closing three deals, and these are long cycle, high-intense sales processes. And I'm like, why can't they just refer one of these a day? They're running into it. And

He'll push back on me and he'll be, I know we're running into Atlance, but that's a fish, and you're asking him or her to climb the tree. And honestly, we'll be better served by focusing that prospect lead elsewhere in the org. So look, you can debate that. I actually still think that they should refer over to their SMB colleagues that leave. I think it's great. But that's not my point. My point is make sure that your organization, that you're not attempting to teach fish to climb trees. The motions are proper.

structurally everything's proper. and by the way, again, that all stops starts up here with your product marketing friends, with your product friends, with your revenue ops leader who has done a lot of analysis him or herself and making those decisions. So I think long story short, it's really the CRO doing what they best do.

Mark Petruzzi (22:03)

Yeah. And a fisk you can't teach a fish to climb up a tree. I love it. Yeah,

KK Anderson (22:08)

I love that.

Mark Petruzzi (22:10)

I would love to ha I'd love to meet your friend that came up with that one because that's a that's a that's a great one. So Lance, what a

KK Anderson (22:14)

Ha ha ha ha.

Lance Haffner (22:15)

He's good. He get he's good.

Mark Petruzzi (22:17)

great discussion thus far. We're gonna pick right back up here next week in part two.

Lance Haffner (22:23)

Okay.

KK Anderson (22:23)

And what Lance just described about shifting a company's organization and revenue into a bowtie structure is the exact work that we do and teach inside the two millimeter club, which is our small group coaching residency for first-line sales leaders. They learn to identify and coach the small shifts in seller behavior that add up.

To exponential movement in pipeline development and in closing pipeline. They're eight-week cohorts and they launch monthly. If you're interested, apply at www.get dashags.com forward slash two mm club. That's get-ags.com forward slash two millimeter club. Join us next week for part two with Lance Hafner.

Mark Petruzzi (23:11)

Beautiful. Great. Okay, let's let's go to the to part

Lance Haffner (23:14)

So

Mark Petruzzi (23:14)

two opening. Lance, great job. This has been great thus far.

Lance Haffner (23:20)

All right.

Thank you.

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General Description

AI is transforming every aspect of sales, but technology alone isn’t enough to drive better performance. In Part 2 of this conversation, Dr. Noah St. John returns to Selling Intelligence to explore why organizations investing heavily in AI, automation, and coaching still struggle to achieve meaningful results.

Building on the Human AI Gap introduced in Part 1, Noah explains why trust has become the most valuable currency in business. He discusses the growing trust recession created by AI-generated content, the importance of authentic expertise over polished marketing, and why buyers must look beyond promises to evaluate real outcomes and proven results.

The conversation also shifts to revenue leadership, where Mark Petruzzi and KK Anderson explore how CROs and CEOs can help teams embrace AI without losing the human judgment, experience, and tribal knowledge that drive long-term success. Through practical examples, including Ford Motor Company’s AI missteps, Noah demonstrates why AI should amplify human capability instead of replacing it.

What You’ll Learn

• Why AI is creating a trust recession across sales, coaching, and advisory businesses
• How to evaluate expertise by focusing on client outcomes instead of marketing claims
• What “high tech requires high touch” means for modern sales organizations
• Why the Human AI Gap continues to limit AI adoption inside companies
• How revenue leaders can coach both the inner game and the outer game
• Why investment creates commitment and accelerates behavior change
• The hidden cost of replacing institutional knowledge with AI
• Why tribal knowledge remains one of the biggest competitive advantages in business
• How AI should augment human expertise instead of replacing experienced professionals
• Practical leadership lessons for navigating AI transformation under board and quota pressure

Key Topics

• The trust recession
• Authenticity versus AI-generated credibility
• Client outcomes as proof of expertise
• High tech and high touch leadership
• The Human AI Gap
• The inner game versus the outer game
• Revenue leadership under AI pressure
• Organizational AI adoption
• Ford Motor Company AI case study
• Tribal knowledge and institutional experience
• Human judgment versus automation
• Coaching sales teams through change
• AI implementation strategy
• Leadership during digital transformation
• Investment and accountability
• Behavioral change
• AI-assisted business growth
• Dale Carnegie and timeless leadership principles

Guest

Dr. Noah St. John is a bestselling author, keynote speaker, performance coach, and founder of SuccessClinic.com. Over nearly 30 years, he has helped entrepreneurs, executives, and revenue leaders overcome the hidden mental barriers that limit performance. As the creator of the Human AI Gap framework, Noah combines neuroscience, psychology, and business strategy to help organizations successfully bridge the gap between human behavior and rapidly evolving AI technology.

Resources Mentioned

• SuccessClinic.com
• The Human AI Gap
• The Caveman Calculator
• Gary Vaynerchuk
• Alex Hormozi
• Dale Carnegie
• How to Win Friends and Influence People
• Ford Motor Company
• AGS Two Millimeter Club

#SellingIntelligence #AIforSales #SalesLeadership #HumanAIGap #RevenueLeadership

Mark Petruzzi (00:38)

Welcome back to Selling Intelligence. I'm Mark Petruzzi.

KK Anderson (00:42)

And I'm KK Anderson. This is part two with Dr. Noah St. John. Be sure to go back and listen to part one. But if you want to start here, let us bring you up to speed. Noah has spent close to 30 years studying why capable people underperform. He has written 27 books and coined the term human AI gap, the distance between 200,000 year old brains, the caveman, as he calls it.

And the fastest technology ever built, which of course is AI. In part one, he drew the line between mindset, which the industry has worn out, and what he calls the inner game, the unconscious programming that decides whether skill and technology ever get used.

Mark Petruzzi (01:24)

In part two, we get to the operator level. What Noah's highest growth clients do differently and what the inner game looks like under real quota and board pressure. Noah, welcome back.

Dr. Noah St. John (01:35)

Thank you, great to be here.

Mark Petruzzi (01:36)

So let's go to to our first topic of our second episode with Noah, and that is high tech requires high touch. The trust recession. You guys all know out there we talk about that trust recession often, and we really want to get some perspective from Noah on this as well. So, Noah, you also have talked about a trust recession in this space.

Where there's too many people with strong marketing skills and weak t teaching ability, or c or strong sales skills and weak coaching ability, how does that dynamic show up for a B2B buyer who is evaluating a coaching or advisory investment right now?

Dr. Noah St. John (02:17)

Well, I mean, this is a huge topic, and I do talk about it a lot, as you mentioned. so very simply, it's exactly what you were saying is that there are a lot of great marketers, great self promoters, great salesmen, who suck at teaching. They suck at coaching, they just there's no there

Mark Petruzzi (02:32)

Yeah.

Dr. Noah St. John (02:32)

there, as I like to say. There's no there there. and so the problem is that is the very problem because they're so good at self promotion and marketing.

Just lots and lots of people bought their stuff. They gave them money and they found out there's nothing here. Hello? What the heck is going on here? They promised the sun, moon, and the stars, and they gave me a pile of dirt, So it's it's really, really bad. I have my own spreadsheet. I call it the spreadsheet of death, you know, because I paid all these clowns tons of money. I mean, much more money than I'd like to admit, only to find out they can't teach every way out of a paper bag.

So it's it's really bad. Now, obviously, I'm not alone in that. I spent a lot more than most people, probably, But the point is that, unfortunately, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people have experienced the same thing that I have, which is hello, you didn't tell me anything. So it's incredibly annoying and it's and it's and it's frustrating and it's painful and it's costly. And so I think one of the things that we have to do as leaders, if you are evaluating a B2B or a B2C.

program, you know, and when I say life changing, I know that sounds like a cliche again, but that is what it really is because that has always been my focus is

Taking care of the three pounds of gray matter that really is just ignored for the most part. And so one of the things that I think people need to do is look at the case studies. Look at the case studies, the real people who have gone through program including Gary Vaynerchuk.

Jenny McCarthy, Stephen Covey, Jack Canfield, John Assarath, Neil Donald Walsh. I mean, you know, the luminaries go on and on. And then, of course, just the regular, everyday CEO, CMO, CRO, entrepreneur I have always said, I've always said this, that it's much more important that people have gotten results rather than.

I say how much money I've made. Because when you look at those gurus out there, that's what they're always talking about. I made all this money. Look at my yacht. Look at my boat. Look at my helicopter. Now, nothing wrong with that. We all want nice things, right? We all want yachts and boats and helicopters. Nothing wrong with that. But my question always is: well, have you helped anyone else? And usually the answer to that question is, what? so

That's the problem. And so I and maybe I went overboard the other way. Maybe I've gone too far the other way. I don't know. But I'd rather brag about my clients than me. You'll notice I talk way more about my clients than myself for that precise reason. Because we live in a trust recession, I'm always like, Well, don't believe what I say. And I'll just have to say this because everybody knows it's there right now. You also have to make sure that those are actual human beings, on a video. Like

because of course we all know that AI can create AI user generated content now. And it's pretty easy to spot still today at the time of this recording. I mean, I can tell in one second, and I think most people can too. I mean, but you just gotta be careful, because hell, it's the greatest thing in the world. Wait a minute, is that a human or not a human? Hmm. We just might want to check that.

KK Anderson (05:21)

Yeah. And you know, you could even ask, like, hey, are you human or are you not? Even when you're chatting with a website, is this an AI agent or is this a human that's named Linda? Right.

Dr. Noah St. John (05:30)

Right. Exactly.

Well, I was talking about just the videos, you know, the actual videos that I mean we s

KK Anderson (05:35)

Mm-hmm.

Dr. Noah St. John (05:35)

we see AI UGC all over the place now. And again, as I said, it's it's relatively easy to spot now, but is it always gonna be easy to spot? Probably not. I mean, it's just gonna keep getting better and better. So you you you know, you better get in now before it gets worse.

KK Anderson (05:48)

So w when you think about what high touch actually looks like in practice for you at this point in your business, like what talk to me a little bit about how, thanks to AI, and creating the trust recession and then you're having to we have to go back now and accommodate for that. Like what does that look like for you and your business and for your clients? What's caused what's what's been successful, I suppose.

Dr. Noah St. John (06:08)

Well, I mean, it

we it doesn't have to be complicated. At least in my case, you know, what we do is a is a very simple intake form and we see where you are. We get a baseline of where you are over the last twelve months. By the way, when you go to

KK Anderson (06:20)

Right. But to get but

to even get to that point where they're interested. Like that marketing

Dr. Noah St. John (06:24)

So I talked about the caveman

but there's also a caveman calculator So that's one of the things that I love is the caveman calculator. And you can actually see how much the caveman is costing you right now. So that's a really important point of if you are not if you haven't learned how to tame the caveman in your brain, you're gonna be paying the caveman. You're gonna be paying, as I call it, the caveman tax.

Because it's absolutely one million percent is going to be holding you back. like Adam, that story I mentioned earlier. it takes longer to close a client typically now than it ever did for that precise reason. So, you know, as a business owner, you you want to make sure that you're putting out correct content, both in terms of video and

And articles, blog posts, books, et cetera. Right.

So that's the point, is that is why we do operate with high tech high touch. And that's one of the ways that we do it is making sure that everybody is accounted for at the level they're at at the time.

KK Anderson (07:17)

Okay. That's super interesting. and Noah, we're gonna jump to the next topic and we're gonna touch back on the inner game a little bit, but specifically as it re relates to a revenue operator. And I know you've worked with, CEOs and and leaders of all different, you know, types of businesses.

And so and kind of thinking about that experience, like when you s when you strip away the tactics and the tools, what is the inner game pattern that separates those, client that has the exponential six hundred percent growth from one that's kind of stalls at thirty percent?

Dr. Noah St. John (07:52)

Well, as I mentioned earlier, you know, when when people listen to me, they get enormous growth. If they don't, then they won't.

KK Anderson (07:58)

Well they listen to you, which means they do the work.

Dr. Noah St. John (08:01)

exactly, And see, well, nobody's when you pay me money, you listen. That's the beautiful

KK Anderson (08:03)

Why would they not listen? Like what are the reasons that you come across why they don't? Right.

Dr. Noah St. John (08:08)

The people who invest, right? When they invest, they're invested, and that means boom, I want my ROI.

I want my return on investment. Boom, I'm to take action. One of the things that I've known for is helping people to take action where they had been stalled previously. Right. I'll give you another example. I mean, I was talking with another client of mine, and he is has a very big biodiesel fuel.

You know, a nine-figure business. And he is not a very loquacious person, very soft spoken, very hard close to the vest and so forth. and one of the times that we were talking in one of our earlier sessions, he said to me, Noah, I have

A Bachelor of Science from a major university. I'm not going to say the name of the university. Now, I almost fell off my chair when he said that, because this is not a man known for being, loquacious and being, big with his words. And I was like, wow, no kidding. Okay. And, now he has gone on to actually sell that company and make a very nice exit.

My point of that is that when you are when you invest, you're invested. So for those of you listening and thinking that whether it's yourself or your team, so if you are a CRO who is pulling your hair out because you're saying, But Noah, I've given my team everything. I've given them all the tools, all the training, all of the things that they should be, they should just be exploding. I will always ask you, but have you helped them with their inner game?

Or is that all outer game stuff? That's why I started this conversation with that Venn diagram I talked about. I mean, inner game, outer game. Ninety nine percent of people are spending all their time, money, and effort on outer game. It's not wrong, you to do it. But have you spent any time on the inner game?

KK Anderson (09:36)

And so are you te are you teaching the leaders so you're teaching

the leaders then how to coach their teams on the inter game or are you coaching the teams directly?

Dr. Noah St. John (09:45)

Well, both. It depends on what they want. Like I talked about, it was it's all bespoke and customized and personalized. So that goes back to the licensing that I was talking about.

There's no more guesswork.

Mark Petruzzi (09:54)

So Noah revenue leaders are under enormous pressure right now, a special

Dr. Noah St. John (09:58)

Yes, yes.

Mark Petruzzi (09:59)

amount of pressure that we really haven't seen throughout at least my career. They're dealing with this AI transition process, their their overall team capacity, quota, quota, quota, and then the boards have gotten a lot more direct and vocal, going after sales leaders as well. So

What does the inner game look like when the stakes are as high as they are and the timelines are as short as they are?

Dr. Noah St. John (10:24)

Well, it's an incredibly stressful situation. You're absolutely right. And this is something that I help people with every single day. But the point is that AI has really changed the perspective of a lot of people in this way. They believe, mostly incorrectly, that if I just toss AI at this, then I'll just it'll solve all my problems. I'll make all this money. I'll give you an example of how this didn't work. and by the way, this was not a company that I was involved with.

But Ford Motor Company, we all well know Ford Motor Company, they recently made big headlines because they fired all their what's called the gray beards, right? All the guys that had been on the front lines, you know, the engineers had been there for 30, 40 years, right? So Ford got all excited about AI and said, we don't need these gray beards, right? It's those annoying humans I was talking about earlier. we're paying them all this money. We don't need them. Hey, all right, we'll let them go and we'll let the AI run the whole schlumiel.

Didn't not work out so well. So what did they have? They had billions of dollars. They save they saved millions, yes, and maybe tens of millions, but they had billions of dollars in recalls because the AI didn't understand all the things the gray beards knew. They and the graybeards just know this without even thinking, right? So it's not like a gray beard, and you understand the term that I'm using there, right? That someone who's just been on the front lines doing this. They they do it without thinking. They're literally

KK Anderson (11:36)

Tribal knowledge. Yeah.

Dr. Noah St. John (11:38)

unconscious. So they don't even know.

They just do things because they know how to do things. But if they even were to sit down and say, try start start to or try to train an AI in what they know, they couldn't even do it anyway. Because they might be able to tell them, say, 80%, but there's 20% that they don't even know they know. Does that make sense? They're unconsciously competent. And so the point is Ford had to, it was very embarrassing, egg on the face. We got to hire all the graybeards back. And oops, sorry about all those recalls. Do you see what I mean? So that's an example of how it.

It's it's AI is not a magic solution. It's not a magic pill. But it does, as you mentioned earlier, it accelerates what's already there. Okay. So what we wanna do is we wanna bridge that human AI gap. We want humans and AI working together. And I think that is the future.

Mark Petruzzi (12:22)

Excellent.

KK Anderson (12:22)

Love it.

Mark Petruzzi (12:23)

really good stuff, Noah.

Dr. Noah St. John (12:25)

I was very excited to get money you know on the internet. Remember internet, yay, internet from literally countries I never even heard of. And it was it was

KK Anderson (12:32)

Yeah.

Dr. Noah St. John (12:33)

very exciting.

KK Anderson (12:33)

Okay. Favorite CRO or CEO that you follow?

Dr. Noah St. John (12:37)

gosh. my favorite CEO, I guess, you know, today is a name that is a somewhat controversial, but Alex Hormozy. Some people know him, some people don't. But he's I think he's he's pretty good. He he does a nice job. And of course Gary Vee, my good friend Gary Vee is always good for a great story and great motivation.

KK Anderson (12:55)

Yes. I enjoy Alex's content as well and Gary's content.

Dr. Noah St. John (12:59)

that is surveys. Surveys are useless. Sorry. but and the reason is very simple because human beings will tell you what you they think you want to hear, and we'll do something totally different. So pre-market or go-to-market surveys are essentially useless. The best thing to do is just put up an ad, put up a quick sales page, run some traffic to it, see if anybody buys it.

Boom, we're done.

KK Anderson (13:20)

Okay, Noah, my favorite question advice you would give your twenty one year old self.

Dr. Noah St. John (13:25)

Don't buy from those friggin' idiots. Get away from that spreadsheet of death. Do your homework, son. Go past the headlines, go past the marketing speak. Don't don't believe them until you do your homework. That's what I wish I would have known.

Mark Petruzzi (13:37)

Nice. Okay.

KK Anderson (13:37)

You've been burned. You've been burned.

Mark Petruzzi (13:39)

Our

Dr. Noah St. John (13:39)

yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (13:40)

our last one is your favorite sales or marketing book?

Dr. Noah St. John (13:43)

you know what? It always goes back to the classics for me. Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People. I just don't see how you can go wrong with that one.

Mark Petruzzi (13:50)

I love it. Noah, this has been a great conversation and exactly the kind of cave con conversation we have built this show for. So thank you for the clarity you bring to this. Thank you for the inner game and your your knowledge transfer there, the human AI gap, and the pac practical path through it. Where should people go to to find your work?

Dr. Noah St. John (14:14)

Go to noahn.com. That's my name, noasaintjohn.com. Easy to remember.

Mark Petruzzi (14:18)

Ha ha ha.

KK Anderson (14:19)

I love it.

You've said that a time or two, huh? Okay.

Dr. Noah St. John (14:21)

Indeed.

KK Anderson (14:22)

We will put all of that in the show notes. And if what Noah said about the inner game is sitting with you, again, that's the work we do inside the two millimeter club, which is our small group data-driven coaching program for frontline sales managers. They learn to identify and coach the small shifts in seller behavior that add up to exponential movement and pipeline.

cohorts launch monthly and we'd love to have your sales managers join us. You can apply at www.get-ags.com forward slash two mm clubs.

Mark Petruzzi (14:58)

And if this conversation was useful, please send it to the leader or team member that you know who you think needs it most. I'm Mark Petruzzi.

KK Anderson (15:07)

And I'm KK Anderson and this is Selling Intelligence. We will see you next time.

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