In this episode of Selling the Cloud, Steve Smith, Chief Revenue Officer at Live Oak Fiber, joins co-hosts Mark Petruzzi and KK Anderson to share what it really takes to stand out in a commoditized market. Drawing from 25+ years of telecom and GTM leadership, Steve reveals how Live Oak is building a “fiercely local” go-to-market model powered by customer obsession, simplicity, and a people-first sales culture.

From recruiting talent outside the industry to treating broadband like a luxury retail experience, Steve breaks down how to differentiate when your product looks the same as everyone else’s on paper, and why NPS scores in the 70s are possible when you design everything around the end user.

What You’ll Learn

• How to Compete in a Commodity Market: Why Live Oak avoids tech jargon and positions packages around home square footage—because customers don’t care about speeds, they care about experiences.
• Hiring Outside the Box: Why Steve hires from Louis Vuitton and paddleboard shops, not just telecom resumes—and how that decision drives creativity and customer care.
• Fiercely Local GTM: Learn how a hyperlocal mindset builds trust, unlocks referrals, and builds brand advocacy—especially in overlooked communities.
• Customer Experience that Rivals Apple: How Live Oak’s white-glove service and full-time technicians boost NPS to 76 (compared to cable companies’ scores below zero).
• Product Simplicity That Wins: How pricing transparency and a “price-for-life” model inspired by the Savannah Bananas builds loyalty and eliminates churn frustration.

Key Topics

• Building a customer-first sales culture
• Differentiating when your product is a utility
• Segmenting sales teams by audience (residential, MDU, SMB)
• Why most broadband companies have a bad reputation—and how to flip it
• Local community engagement as a growth strategy
• Metrics that matter: NPS, feedback loops, and service consistency

Guest Spotlight: Steve Smith

Steve Smith is the Chief Revenue Officer at Live Oak Fiber, where he leads go-to-market strategy across residential, business, and MDU channels. A veteran telecom executive with a passion for customer-first innovation, Steve is helping redefine broadband with a culture that starts and ends with people—both inside and outside the business.

Resources & Mentions

• Book: Good to Great by Jim Collins
• Book: Start with Why by Simon Sinek
• Inspiration: Savannah Bananas (yes, really!)

🎧 Listen now and subscribe to Selling the Cloud wherever you get your podcasts. Stay tuned for Part 2 with Steve next week!

Mark Petruzzi (00:31)

Welcome to today's episode of Selling the Cloud podcast. We're excited to welcome Steve Smith, Chief Revenue Officer of Live Oak Fiber. Steve is a seasoned telecom executive and growth strategist with more than 25 years in leadership roles across sales, marketing, and product. At Live Oak Fiber, Steve is helping to redefine how broadband providers can stand out in the world.

where internet service is both a necessity and a commodity. Under his leadership, Vivo has adopted a customer first model from hiring outside the industry to building fresh perspectives that simplified billing and driving net promoter scores in the range of Apple, not in the range of many of their competitors. Today, Steve will share what it takes to build growth culture

and differentiation in a commoditized market, lessons that apply well beyond technology to any CRO or CMO navigating crowded competitive categories. Four themes for today. Building a people first go to market organization, so powerful. Differentiating in a commoditized market, I guess I would say so, so painful sometimes. Balancing residential business and MDU

go to market motions, and how to leverage AI community engagement for growth as well. This episode is packed with practical insights for revenue leaders looking to drive loyalty, accelerate adoption, and differentiate in highly competitive markets or less highly competitive markets if there are any of those still out there. Let's dive in. Welcome, Steve. We're so happy to have you here on Selling the Cloud.

Steve Smith (02:07)

Thanks, Mark. Thanks, KK. It's great to be here. I'm excited to have this conversation. I'm always excited to talk about Live Oak.

Mark Petruzzi (02:09)

Excellent.

Yeah, for sure. And we've had some nice little discussions as well before this. So we think we've got a good one for you. Topic one, building a people first go to market organization. So Steve, you have said your biggest early advantage was hiring people outside of telecom. And tell us a little bit, that was also at some of your other telecom companies that you've worked for or if that's been a new approach at Live Oak.

Steve Smith (02:19)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (02:38)

And why was that decision so important?

Steve Smith (02:42)

I've always looked for people that bring fresh perspectives. think industries that are older, it's easy to get into a rut. I think over past 20 years, I've hired people that ran, for instance, there's a gentleman in Chattanooga, I worked for a company down there, and one of our first hires was the gentleman that ran the rec soccer league program. He was in charge of scheduling all the fields, recruiting referees, and needed someone

Highly organized and local, and his name's Billy Tendal, if he's listening, and we got Billy, we were excited to have him, and now he's probably 20 years in a career in telecom, but Billy was highly organized. He understood people, and he understood what made people tick, and how to navigate all that. People can get a little testy on their soccer field scheduling, so that's how we got Billy. But that was just one example, and at Live Oak,

definitely intentionally got people outside of telecom because they bring a fresh perspective. They bring creativity. I look for people that have a customer first mindset and when you have kind of an older industry you need these fresh ideas. You need energy and you need people that are really kind of bought into your mission and what you're doing and if they have the will you know you can teach them the skill but you can't teach that customer first centric thing.

We have a lot of people that have sold paddleboards. I've had some top salespeople that have rented beach chairs. The first sales manager we hired who's now a director, she ran sales for Louis Vuitton here in Denver and Aspen. Louis Vuitton and Lululemon are two brands that she worked for. if you're listening, if you're familiar with those brands, like my daughters and wife would knock me down to get into a Lululemon store and...

If one customer's upset, they're all upset. And if you have that mindset and you bring that to telecom, it's disruptive in a great way. So yeah, it's always worked out. Always worked out, though.

Mark Petruzzi (04:22)

Yeah, and

Steve, you've already proven that you're bolder than me because I've done that and I have accomplished some of that throughout my career and I've done it in a different way. Forget about just legacy industries, but even new industries or kind of middle of the road industries, that fresh idea is so, powerful.

Steve Smith (04:35)

Okay.

Mark Petruzzi (04:44)

But as you were describing what you've gone through, it reminded me of some times that I've lost that battle. And for example, like where I've had to go to a board and get approval for that type of hire or that individual or working, I've worked a lot with private equity companies and private equity company and operating partners coming back and being like, you're crazy. This other person we're talking about is just.

Steve Smith (04:49)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (05:09)

12 years and exactly what we're doing here and you're telling me you want to bring somebody from the telecom industry into this SaaS software company. maybe I should have been a little bit more bold and little more, just persevered a little more. And I'd have some more stories that mirror your stories as well, but very impressive.

Steve Smith (05:27)

Well,

don't all work out, but for the most part they do. If you're betting on people, they do. And I like to bet on people. And you get athletes. When you look at teams when they're drafting players, they always have, okay, I need to fill this position. But if they get to the point in the draft where there's an athlete on the board, maybe doesn't fit what they're looking for, but can play, they get that person. They get that person because

They're adaptable. They can wear many hats. They can deal with adversity. And then you can figure out where they fit. I think that book, Good to Great, talks about get the right people on the bus first. And then you can figure out where they sit. But get them on the bus. mean, entrepreneurs, a lot of times, and you interview people and they'll say, we want an entrepreneur. And they really don't because it's kind of messy.

Mark Petruzzi (06:05)

I love it.

Steve Smith (06:14)

So you have to have, I think in the case of Live Oak, I think we got lucky and blessed that we had some investors that were okay with messy. wanted, entrepreneurs starting something new is messy. For some people that are crazy like me and some of the first 20, 30 people we hired, that's fun. For others, that is absolute chaos and they're gonna get upset quick. So it just takes time, but having those fresh perspectives. The other kind of example I look at is that

The movie Ford versus Ferrari is a great example of an entrepreneur working with an old company and they took a bet on Carroll Shelby and they crushed it. They beat a brand that had won that Le Mans race hands down for, I don't know, 20 years. And they got so good, they were good at building machines and he was good at managing people that were eccentric but were athletes. But they could build a machine that could go incredibly fast, they could work together to do it. Didn't fit into the Ford mode.

Mark Petruzzi (07:03)

No way.

Steve Smith (07:03)

of course, but that

wasn't what they wanted. They wanted to win Le Mans and I think when they won it, the year they won it, they won it first, second, third. They were so far ahead that they had to ask the lead driver to slow down so they could have a photo finish, one, two, and three. So that is a great way to kind of look at it. It doesn't always work out, but sometimes you win, sometimes you learn. I've learned a lot. I've learned a lot, Mark, so you know.

Mark Petruzzi (07:16)

haha

KK Anderson (07:18)

Wow.

Well, and.

Steve Smith (07:28)

It happens.

KK Anderson (07:29)

in thinking about, especially kind of our theme today with selling in a commoditized market. And, when it's a commodity, it's the same as everybody else, right? These are items that are utility, if you will. And when you were starting Live Oak Fiber, in a telecom industry where there's a lot of competition and everyone in their mind has their sort of

mindset and perspective or perception, if you will, of what a telecom company does, what might differentiate them. when you're hiring outside of telecom and you're bringing in kind of those passionate customer-focused sellers, I think by default you're breaking the mold because they're not just going to go sell a commodity because they don't know anything about it.

Steve Smith (08:03)

Ahem.

Well, and them not knowing about it is a huge advantage too. When we brought people on, it's literally like you get a focus group of people that will tell you how to sell the product because we get in a rut. We use acronyms. Telecom is notorious. We have a lot of acronyms and we get so used to saying and we forget. We think we're selling technology, but it's really a solution. And when you bring someone in that's not from the industry, they'll tell you how you should sell it because it speaks

So you have this own group and I tell them this constantly I'm like always go back to when we first talked like that's the perspective I need don't get wrapped up in the doodads and the Connectors and the acronyms think about how we positioned the product in the beginning and how we spoke about it a good example for us was in the beginning talking about packages for residential customers we Decided that most people most people really believe the internet is the Wi-Fi in their house

And most people know how big their house is, how many rooms they have and devices. So we've designed the packages around square footage in homes. And if your home is about this big, most people know, then you probably should have this package. And that made sense. It was easy to talk to people about that. It was a lot easier than trying to tell them about speeds, which nobody understands. The quality of a speed, like a fiber versus a wireless connection or whatever, they

KK Anderson (09:25)

I still don't understand that.

Steve Smith (09:28)

Yeah, nobody does. They just want it to work. They will not say the internet doesn't work, they'll say the Wi-Fi is out. Well, what's the Wi-Fi isn't working. So that's how they relate to it, and that's how we started positioning the products in the beginning. But to get out of that commodity mode is difficult, and it is a race to the zero. And what we decided initially was we would be fiercely local.

we don't have, a lot of companies have a mission statement. We decided to have a, why. Why do you come into work every day? And we followed this, Sinek is the one that invented this. He wrote a book, you know, Find Your Why. And if you find your why, then people do more. And our why is to improve the quality of lives of the communities that we serve through technology. And that's it. So if you take your why and apply it to problems as you go through the day,

KK Anderson (09:58)

Mm-hmm.

Steve Smith (10:12)

It's really easy to get to a customer focused mindset. We're there to serve. So we talk about the communities we serve and our customers live in these communities and we want to be their local internet company. And we have customers online say, that's, I have, you know, I love my Live Oak. And that when they say that I'm like, okay, we're, we're on message. on, we've, we've, it's the best feeling and it's more than internet. You know, it's we want them to be a

KK Anderson (10:30)

That's gotta be the best feeling.

Steve Smith (10:36)

partner they value, not a bill that they tolerate. I think if you rate different types of things that people spend money on, the things that they really hate to spend money on or hate to interact with is the dentist. Sorry for all the dentists out there, but you already know that. But then it's the cable company and probably a close second is your mobile company. And you don't really care to hear from them. You get a bill, you pay it, my gosh, is it really this much this month? And you don't get any interaction from them or any great ideas.

We look at as we try to change that paradigm and make it a better experience if they do interact with our people. So, hey, let me help you get your streaming hooked up. Some companies will outsource their technicians. We have full-time technicians. Full-time technicians with Career Path, because that's really the face of our company. Yeah, they're gonna see me, unfortunately. I have a face for radio. Maybe they'll hear me, but they're gonna see those technicians, or they're gonna remember them by name. And sometimes they take their cell number, because they're gonna stay and make sure, hey, I'm gonna...

I want this to be almost a white glove experience. When I leave the customers home, everything is going to work. The gaming is going to work, the streaming, they're going to know who to call if there's an issue. And I think that's the mindset we have. And that's how you separate it from the commodity. It's hard. You get a lot of noise to

KK Anderson (11:42)

I love that.

Fiercely local. I absolutely love that. That's incredible. And do you have a commercial organization as well where you're selling to businesses?

Steve Smith (11:51)

We do. have our sales teams are organized around the customer types. So we have a group that works mainly with residential customers. We have a group that works with business customers. And then we have a group that works with multi-dwelling units. So you have town homes or condos or resort campus locations and homeowners associations. And those are specific sales teams, professional sales teams that understand those customers and what they're looking for. Now everybody knows what everybody does.

So there's handoffs. if a business customer, if you sell a business in town and you join a chamber, they probably have a home in the town. So you pass that lead off to the residential team. Or if you're a residential user, you probably know someone that has a small business and you can start to get this cross pollination on referrals and things like that. So that's how we delineated at Live Oak.

Mark Petruzzi (12:36)

I love it. So Steve, you've compared your approach to the Savannah bananas ticket pricing. I have, and I guess that's kind of simple, transparent, no hidden fees. Make a comment of Savannah bananas there, just a sidebar. When that came out, when I first saw that was out there, my initial reaction was no, never.

these guys flipping around and doing that and throwing the ball. But it keeps kind of showing up on some of my sports feeds and surely but surely I'm starting to say like, know, wow, maybe we do see this. Now I don't have any, eight year olds, 10 year olds that would, you know, in my family at this point. So it'd be a little harder to go to Savannah Benton Bananas. Maybe I would have been a little more inclined. But

Steve Smith (13:00)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (13:23)

But I have to say that level of connection they have to their customers, to their target market, it's incredible. So for you, how does that translate into loyalty? How does that transfer into the customer experience?

Steve Smith (13:33)

It is.

Well, to be fair, I didn't know about the Savannah Bananas either when we started Live Oak about three years ago. And I heard about them and a friend said, if you ran a baseball team, this is probably what it would end up as, you know, all these shenanigans going on. And so of course I was interested in it and, but we were already kind of down the path. So we were trying to do the opposite of what the large cable companies did. a lot of times you have fees or whatever you buy online.

Mark Petruzzi (13:51)

Hmm.

Steve Smith (14:05)

Every other thing that you buy online, you say it's $12.87. It's literally $12.87. It's not $12.87 plus some strange fee, some strange fee. It is what it is, except for, unfortunately, a lot of these subscription telecom services. It starts to get a little wonky. So we just eliminated that and we don't have those fees. And we had to overcome a lot of kind of market confusion around that. We even offered a

The first promotion we did, which we still offer, is Price for Life. Because people literally feel like, okay, I get it, you're gonna give me this rate for a year and then you're gonna come back to me and jack it up at 20 bucks and I'm gonna have to wrangle my way back. So anyway, that's what we did. But as we got going, I ended up finding out about the Savannah Bananas, which is a great story. The guy that owns it is Jesse Cole. And I started listening to how he did it and he was a startup. There was a nearly abandoned baseball stadium

Savannah and he said I've got this idea about baseball. He went through the startup Savannah incubator there and they helped him. I mean of course they were like absolutely we'll help you do something with that abandoned baseball stadium that's a kind of an eyesore and he created a brand out of it and he was like he goes through a lot of the so if you order a ticket from the Savannah bananas and it's $20 it's $20.

Mark Petruzzi (14:57)

Wow.

Steve Smith (15:20)

It also includes, if you do it at the home stadium, you get a coke and you get a meal. So it's a two hour show, kind of like the Harlem Globetrotters, but with baseball. And it's hard to create that in baseball, but he's done it. And they have meetings all the time. Now he's got spinoffs because there's the party animals and I think there's now there's new teams like the tailgaters and the firefighters. And now he's like running all these groups that are, banana ball. They have like rules about banana ball, but

Mark Petruzzi (15:26)

Yeah.

He did it.

Steve Smith (15:45)

if you watch him, talks about the customer experience and that's everything. he's super successful and we just happen to be in the same area at the same time and I haven't met him yet. But I love everything that he's doing and if I can incorporate more of what Jesse's doing into us, absolutely, because it works. Customers are really connected with him.

Mark Petruzzi (16:02)

Maybe you should

sign them up as your corporate sponsorship.

Steve Smith (16:08)

We're in discussions. a sponsor yet.

Mark Petruzzi (16:10)

There you go.

KK Anderson (16:11)

that's

What's so funny is I actually remember where I was sitting at Los Tios restaurant on Westheimer in Houston the first time I saw the Savannah bananas. And I was like, what is this? what? Because we're like, why are the Astros not on? And we ended up watching it and we were laughing so hard and we had so much fun that night. I, my customer experience was

Steve Smith (16:22)

Yes.

Right.

outstanding.

KK Anderson (16:33)

Like, wow, this is so cool. I was immediately on their website. Like, how do I go see them? Yeah, it was really cool. Okay.

Steve Smith (16:36)

Right, right. Yeah, they get great,

great connections.

KK Anderson (16:41)

Steve, one thing I know you're super proud of is your Net Promoter Score rivals Apple's, which is awesome. And most broadband providers, their NPS scores are in the toilet, or far lower. So I don't know, tell how you achieve that and tell me the numbers. Like what's yours, what's kind of somebody else's? I think it's super important to differentiate.

Steve Smith (16:53)

their love.

We measured quarterly

now. We're going to go to a transactional measurement. For those listening that don't know, a net promoter score is how likely is someone to purchase a service to recommend it to other people. And they rate that number on a zero to 100. most cable companies are very, and you can be negative. So most cable companies, if they're lucky, zero to 10. Most are negative.

Mark Petruzzi (17:23)

Wow.

Wow.

Steve Smith (17:24)

Well, right, for all those reasons. And then if you get a good, a decent broadband provider, a new broadband provider, you're probably in the 40s or 50s. Google as a company, separate company, probably runs in the 60s. Apple runs in the 70s. We're 76, which we're super proud of. And we measure it every quarter, so thank you, it's a lot. And the best thing about it though is if...

KK Anderson (17:41)

Congratulations.

Steve Smith (17:46)

Rich Shea is our COO and he said, we pulled the numbers and he's like, is this true? If people interact with our customer service team, that number actually goes up by 68 points. So that's true, six to eight. It'll go up to 82 84 because we have people that they're bought into the why and they want to solve the problem. So we're very excited about that. We're moving to a transactional model.

KK Anderson (17:58)

By how many?

Wow!

Steve Smith (18:11)

So you're probably familiar after you have an install or you eat at a restaurant, they say how good was our service? And you rate them, that translates in that five questionnaire thing will translate into a score. And so we use that and we look at that, we try to figure out who's upset and how we can work with them and to bring it up. We're happy with the ones that are happy obviously, but that's just part of, that's just one of the.

I call it the money ball statistics that we focus on. We don't focus on all of them. We try to find the important ones. And that's definitely a key one. That's a differentiator.

KK Anderson (18:44)

so you do like real time customer feedback. Like when, when your technician's walking out the door, they're getting a text message with five questions.

Steve Smith (18:50)

We're

young, that's our next phase. That's what I would call transactional NPS. And that's what we're gonna do next. And I'm excited to see how that looks. And yes, it's gonna rate people down to the resource level, how good you do, but our folks are competitive and they don't, this will be good for all of us. So today we just do it, we do an email and we have a very high participation rate for that.

You've got to get a certain amount. I wish I knew the numbers off the top of my head, but it can't just be like five people. can't call your mom and your grandma and have them skew the survey. You've got to have a certain amount to fill it out to get that number. We do it through a third party, it's legit number. We're excited about that.

Mark Petruzzi (19:27)

Cool.

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In Part 2 of this Selling the Cloud episode, Jamie Wilkinson, CEO of Smart4Cloud.ai, continues his insightful conversation with Mark Petruzzi and KK Anderson on how today’s revenue teams must evolve beyond job specs and tech stacks.

From building integrated, cross-functional orgs to navigating partner ecosystems, Jamie breaks down how human-centered leadership and honest business assessment unlock true scalability. He also shares the key attributes that define top sales leaders and how to spot high-impact talent in any market.

What You’ll Learn:

• Cross-Functional Alignment is a Growth Lever: Why modern revenue teams can’t operate in silos and how top-performing orgs build “fluidity” between sales, finance, tech, and marketing.
• Humanizing the Hiring Process: How Jamie’s commitment model goes beyond résumés to find high-performing candidates who align with the company’s story—not just the bullet points.
• AI Isn’t the Enemy or the Answer: Jamie shares a grounded take on AI: it’s not about fear or hype, but about how humans apply it to improve real lives and sales performance.
• Build or Buy? Market Expansion Strategy: Jamie discusses when to build internally vs. leverage partner ecosystems, and why brutal honesty is the real unlock for scale.
• Agility, Honesty, and Culture: The traits Jamie believes will define successful GTM teams over the next 12–18 months.

Key Topics:

• Aligning technical, sales, and product leadership
• How to recruit talent that thrives in integrated orgs
• Getting past fear-based narratives around AI
• Internal vs. external capability building
• Leadership traits that matter in “normal” markets
• How to spot people with “G.A.S.” (Givers who actually… care)

Guest Spotlight: Jamie Wilkinson

Jamie Wilkinson is the Founder and CEO of Smart4Cloud.ai, a human-first revenue talent partner for modern B2B teams. With deep experience in building technical + sales hybrid teams, Jamie brings practical wisdom and a no-BS approach to growing revenue orgs that work.

Resources & Mentions:

• Part 1 of Jamie Wilkinson’s episode
• Guest Mention: Napoleon Baligan, founder of 1-800-Mattress
• Reference Book: To Sell is Human (by implication)
• Podcast: Selling the Cloud

🎧 Listen now and follow Selling the Cloud for more GTM insights from leaders who’ve done the work. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Mark Petruzzi (00:31)

KK, can you take us into topic three?

KK Anderson (00:33)

Yeah,

the third topic is what we're calling the integration effect. So it's how technical excellence amplifies sales performance. And I just would like to piggyback on what you were just saying about the destination, right? destination. And so when we think about the strategy around how to get to that destination and the alignment between the

technical leaders, product leaders of an organization, the revenue leaders, the marketing leaders, like all of the different kinds of cross-functional like that's, how do the best revenue leaders orchestrate these various functions so that everybody is going to the same destination?

Jamie (01:13)

I think there has to be a fluidity and an alignment there. I think if you look at kind of years past when I first came into the industry or even was just working right, I think everything was very. Segmented And that was too many hits from American football.

Everything was very segmented finance was finance compliance was compliance tech was tech sales was sales Marketing was marketing. But if you look at a really successful business now, there's a fluidity and there's an alignment where it may not Completely gel together but the best Finance guys are the people that are understanding what's happening in sales understanding what's happening in marketing

understanding what's happening in compliance and how that's relevant to what they're doing in finance. The best salespeople are understanding what's happening in finance and how they can utilize that or what's happening in tech. So I think that if you look at any amazing business, particularly SMEs, right? Who are massively profitable and charging forward a dramatic rate, those businesses will be very in twine. They won't be segmented.

everybody will have some kind of touch point on everything. And I think the difference between 20 years ago and now is that alignment and that kind of fluidity between the different parts of the business.

Mark Petruzzi (02:40)

Yeah, and you know what? I was putting together some of these questions and what I wanted to get to is how much better you are and your company is at recruiting sales leadership and sales reps because of the fact that you also recruit those technical skills as well. Or for example, in Salesforce, you recruit, you know,

technical architect, solution architects, all of that. And maybe I even restricted us a little bit with some of that thinking as you've already brought us into some other areas. So what I'm taking away here is the importance of, as you're describing, the integration between all these functions. We're talking about technical mostly, but whether it's coordinating with marketing or product management or...

All of that stuff, the more you can bring to the equation, especially in today's age, the more valuable you are as a recruiter to your clients. the clients, so the companies now, I mean, in general, you've seen deals won and lost time and time again because of this whole coordination between sales and these other functions. When you recommend

I guess maybe the biggest part of this question is when you go out and you find the talent for your clients, how do you make sure, how do you figure out who's gonna be world-class at the collaboration or who's gonna be average or worse?

Jamie (04:10)

wow, question. For us, you know, we go through a process of, call it a commitment model, but it basically is the undressing of a, of an opportunity. you like, there was nothing locked out. Everything is visible. And again, you're looking at ultimately the conclusion of what somebody needs to do and what needs to happen. I think the play out with, with candidates is, is always the context that

rather than taking them through a stage process, you take them through a story or you take them through a journey. So this, you know, this is where we're starting and this is where we need to get to. This is your, your place in the process. This is your role in the process and understanding that they've got the ability to tell that story. Sounds a bit cheesy, but it's true. You know, it's kind of like, right. Okay. Rather than just reading the book, can you actually be in the book?

And from candidates, I think it's really important to candidates as well, because we, so much of the industry sells jobs in bullet points and job specs, which are about as interesting as me. Right. ⁓ and, and we try and move away from that. We try and understand what people are actually needing, why they're needing it and what's going to happen if that, ⁓ that solution is fulfilled.

So we can break it down into a much more real scenario. think we need to get away from, you know, boring ads with, you know, X, Y, and Z required, da, da, da, da, da, you know, the importance of talent solution providers like ourselves is the fact that we can take something that looks.

pretty dull and bring it to life. Because when you bring it to life, it becomes real. And then you can understand who's going to do well and who's not. Clearly to a point that we can't control human beings, but what we can do is to really try and understand people and understand the role itself and how that's going to pan out. And I guess my overarching answer to that is try and humanize a job spec. There you go.

Mark Petruzzi (06:31)

Excellent. So KK, can you help us kind of pull this all together?

KK Anderson (06:32)

There's a, there's a.

Yeah, I was just going to say there's ⁓ a big element of, in our conversation today and gosh, in the conversations I've been having all day around, you know, to sell is still human, to lead is still human. And yes, we have AI and we have some incredible robust ways to accelerate being human and to become superhuman, right? But it's human, right?

Jamie (07:06)

We are always gonna need people, but you know, I'm not in the side of the room where I'm concerned that iRobot is gonna take over the world and we're gonna have to run for the hills and we're gonna live in tents whilst the robots run the cities.

The reality of it is, that right now where we are in life, there's some incredible technology that's allowing some wonderful things in the health industry, you know, probably more so than anything else. I think it's unbelievable what they're doing. But the reality is that all of these things are being built by humans, right? And all of these, all of these technologies are being created by people. People are always going to be here, right? People are always going to be pushing the narrative and

I just think we need to get away from this kind of scaremonger scenario where people have, we're never going to, know, nurses aren't going to have jobs. Yeah, they are. They are right. Teachers. There's going to be no more teachers. Everybody's going to get taught by a laptop. No, that's not the case. Certainly not at the moment. And why don't we just stop kind of going one way or the other? Because I think there's a, there's a natural

negative reaction to tech from certain people, know, my mother, for example, right, you know, the elderly, a lot of the time where they see it as a concern, it shouldn't be a concern. And it shouldn't be the answer. It should be, we have an opportunity to use some incredible technology to better people's lives, to help people's health.

to help people learn, help people sell, help people make more money, so and have a better life and provide for their families. Like stop freaking out. It's not one way or the other. Like they're together.

KK Anderson (09:02)

Imagine

Mark Petruzzi (09:02)

Jamie, I love that.

KK Anderson (09:03)

what we will be able to do.

Jamie (09:06)

I mean like, you're just stupid.

Mark Petruzzi (09:09)

And Jamie, that quote, think, it's profound. mean, it shouldn't be a concern. AI shouldn't be a concern, and it shouldn't be the answer, because it's not the full answer. so there's that happy medium. KK, you'll bring us to this final topic we had here that I look at it as

Jamie (09:23)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (09:36)

You know, what Jamie does as a recruiter, what good recruiters do, what good leaders do is, you know, the ability to bring this all together to increase sales effectiveness, to allow market expansions to happen quicker, more efficiently. So let's, if you have a question, jump in. If not, I have one too.

KK Anderson (10:02)

I do. it's hard, like going back to this last topic after such a profound statement that you just made there, I think, I can't wait to see the clips from this. But yeah, let's talk about market, market expansion strategy. So you work with direct customers through, you also work through systems integrators, right? ⁓ How should revenue leaders think about building

Jamie (10:13)

God.

KK Anderson (10:30)

internal capabilities versus like leveraging partner ecosystems when they're when they're going to be expanding into new markets. Like do you have a philosophy or best practice? ⁓

Jamie (10:42)

no, I think my answer would be the same. think, you know, businesses have an opportunity right now to better themselves through technology, but technology isn't the answer because if we don't have the right people, then the technology becomes irrelevant. And I think, I think at the moment there is, you know, the market is pretty risk adverse, right? With regards to, you know, the economy's up and down like a yo-yo.

And I think that people are concerned about cost and outlay, which I get, and they're not incorrect for having that. But I think.

I think there needs to be like a truth pill. And I think people need to kind of take the truth pill and look at their business and be honest with themselves. And, you know, whether it's staffing or, you know, more heads, whether it's technology, whether it's, you know, the fact that what they have isn't great and probably needs rectifying in order for them to allow themselves to progress at a quicker rate.

think people just need to be honest. think I do think there's a lot of the market at the moment, just, you know, they are like to call it the ostrich. You just find a bit of mud outside and whack your head into it and stand there for a while and pretend that everything's okay. Don't be an ostrich. Just be honest. You know, the only way that you can make things better is if you actually know what you've really got.

KK Anderson (12:10)

And I guess that determines whether you build an internal team or you use a, know, outsource it, yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (12:11)

Very interesting.

Jamie (12:18)

100%. Yeah. Or you do both. Or, you know, you, I think we, we had the, we had the steamroller of, of kind of post COVID where everybody was going bonkers and doing extremely well. And the economy was amazing. And there was a lot of over hiring and you know, we came out the other side and it was, it was pretty torrid. Um, and it was tough for everybody. It's, know, especially the recruitment industry and,

You know, people ask me about the market now and quite frankly, you know, is it still bad or it's not good. it's terrible. It's kind of like, no, it's not. It's probably just normal. But we were spoiled and in a place where we thought that it became normality and it wasn't. We were, we were in, you know, we were on the, we were on a hot streak. were riding the wave all the way. And then all of a sudden the wave stopped and we fell off. And I think now the ocean is just kind of

bobbing along right normally but I do think that there's an opportunity out there for every business owner for every sales leader for every salesperson be agile be fluid understand the opportunities and the people that you're working with be thorough be honest and you'll be fine

Mark Petruzzi (13:38)

All right, so we need a little bit of Jamie prognostication here and some forecasting. So looking ahead 12 to 18 months, what capabilities, you know, across the board here, let's keep it more around sales leadership and other leadership within a company. What will separate the leaders who can scale their businesses successfully in this market?

that you're describing this normal market rather than the abnormal market we had for four or five years. And what should these leaders be investing in now? And I know one thing you're gonna say is people, and that should always be a core part of it. And they should. ⁓ But what else? Like how do they put it all together?

Jamie (14:32)

I agility is really important right now. I think any business that allows themselves to be agile and move accordingly is gonna grow at a better pace than others. I think being stagnated and just doing what you do isn't the market anymore. It's not a transactional market. That's not what we're in.

We're in an opportunistic market. think understanding your product, understanding what you're doing and understanding what's working is important. And I think it sounds kind of crazy that I'm saying that, but I do think that there is a real problem with that right now in the industry, in certain, in certain businesses. think ⁓ understanding your people, understanding who's in and who's not.

I have a term that I use all the time and I say, you know, the most important thing to me and my business is people that have gas. ⁓ The third word is a naughty word, which I won't say, but the first two words are giver.

So I think you can probably guess what that means if people have gas then people care if people care people will do something if people do something You've got a chance of winning So look around you and work out those people have gas and if they have gas we're in a pretty good place and then you can start to figure out your business but there has to be a cumulative want and desire for any business to work because You're only as good as your weakest your weakest link, right? ⁓

And I do think that, you know, when I look at, there's one particular business that I look at that's unbelievably over a four year period. And it's somebody that you know, Mark. And

It's just desire. Everybody they've brought into that business is just on it. They want it. And it's not whether they're in sales or in finance or in marketing. And again, it comes back to what I talked about earlier on, culture.

KK Anderson (16:47)

I'm sorry.

Mark Petruzzi (16:47)

Isn't it incredible how simple it can be if we really can parse it down? All right, we're going to move you into the last step of this whole journey with us and one we love the most, our rapid fire questions. And the first question I'm going to ask you, and I'm going to make a comment first. So Jamie is still ripped. He's still in great shape.

Jamie (16:54)

massively.

Mark Petruzzi (17:15)

But I bet you there was a time when you were early in your career and you were, you know, knowing you probably eight to 10 % body fat going on. When you were young and starting all that, tell us about the first revenue critical hire you helped the company make and how you did that then versus how you would do it again with all the experience you have now.

Jamie (17:17)

Thanks, Mark.

Where? Plus, I'm going deep into the history there. ⁓

Mark Petruzzi (17:45)

Well, tell us

KK Anderson (17:46)

First lane.

Mark Petruzzi (17:46)

first,

have you ever been sub 10 % body fat? That's, yeah, I figured you'd have that. No, yeah, you still look great.

Jamie (17:50)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not at the moment, but yeah, many moons. ⁓

so my first...

KK Anderson (18:01)

First, revenue critical hire.

Jamie (18:03)

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So I think I remember it. I was working for Hayes at the time. ⁓ And Superguy. ⁓ And I went very much on personality. ⁓ You know, I talk about buying personalities, amiable, pragmatic, analytical, extrovert.

And irrelevant of how I come across, I'm massively amiable. I like working with people that I like, whether that's a good or bad thing. And I really liked the guy and he was kind of purely based upon that. And luckily it worked out because he was quite good. However, if he'd been terrible, then I wouldn't have known because it was kind of like, oh, he's a cool dude. You know, we'd like the same things. You've got a job. I mean, it was just...

It was terrible really, ⁓ luck was on my side because he did turn out to be a guy.

KK Anderson (19:02)

That's awesome. Who, Jamie, who is your favorite CRO or sales leader to follow? And I think I already know how you're going to answer this, but as it relates to building world-class, I do!

Mark Petruzzi (19:03)

Excellent.

Jamie (19:13)

You think I'm going to say Branson, don't you?

Mark Petruzzi (19:16)

Yeah.

Jamie (19:16)

Well, Richard Branson's up there, but there's a, do you know, do you guys know Napoleon Baligan? Yeah. I think his story is so cool. And he completely took a punt on something that he had no idea if it was going to work. And it did. So I love his story. The whole 1-800 sofa was it? And 1-800 mattress was him. Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (19:39)

Yeah, yep,

very cool. Yeah.

Jamie (19:41)

Which was such a cool thing,

Just plug the numbers in and spell whatever you're selling. It's kind of very random, but very cool. So he's up there.

Mark Petruzzi (19:51)

and perfect idea and thought for the times. Like it was just built for where we were. Everything was phone-based.

Jamie (19:56)

Yeah, well he completely, he

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 the Cloud, Jamie Wilkinson, CEO of Smart4Cloud.ai, joins Mark Petruzzi and KK Anderson to explore how the best revenue organizations combine technical talent and sales leadership to create scalable, high-impact GTM engines.

With 25 years of experience in both technical talent strategy and revenue organization design, Jamie breaks down how CROs and CEOs can avoid siloed growth models by integrating sales and technical infrastructure, especially in today’s AI-powered ecosystem.

What You’ll Learn:

• Tech Talent as Revenue Infrastructure: Why roles like solution architects, SEs, and customer-facing engineers are now critical for sales success, not just delivery.
• Overcoming Tool Sprawl: How to focus less on “more tools” and more on extracting real value from your existing stack.
• Culture > Tech: Why a strong leadership culture still outperforms even the best tech when it comes to execution.
• The Visibility Gap: How AI platforms like Collective[i] help sales orgs see what’s really happening so they can coach, forecast, and prioritize smarter.
• How to Hire for AI-Era Sales: What today’s technical-hybrid sales roles look like, and how to recruit for adaptability, not just hard skills.

Key Topics:

• Sales leadership architecture
• Customer-facing technical roles in modern GTM
• Strategic use of AI tools in sales orgs
• Aligning technical capabilities with deal velocity
• Why forecasting is broken—and how to fix it
• The difference between productivity KPIs vs. outcome KPIs
• Revenue visibility and operational clarity
• Leadership lessons from elite team sports

Guest Spotlight: Jamie Wilkinson

Jamie Wilkinson is the founder and CEO of Smart4Cloud.ai, where he helps revenue leaders architect both technical and sales teams to drive market advantage. With a background in elite sales recruiting, technical hiring, and growth strategy, Jamie brings a unique lens to what it takes to scale high-performance organizations in the AI era.

🎧 Listen now and follow Selling the Cloud for practical GTM strategies and sharp conversations at the edge of sales, leadership, and growth.

Mark Petruzzi (00:00)

Welcome to today's episode of Selling the Cloud podcast. We're excited to welcome Jamie Wilkinson, CEO and founder of Smart4Cloud.ai. Jamie brings nearly 25 years of experience helping revenue leaders build both the technical capabilities and sales leadership teams that drive predictable growth. As the founder of Smart4Cloud, he specialized in understanding how technical talent strategy

and sales organization design work together to accelerate revenue. How it works across cloud SaaS, cloud pass and AI management platforms. However, what Jamie truly unique is his dual perspective on revenue architecture. He understands both how technical capabilities enable sales success and how sales leadership structure determines market execution.

At Smart for Cloud, he's helped revenue organizations across financial services, healthcare, energy, and technology sectors build integrated teams where technical excellence and sales leadership amplify each other. Jamie has seen how the best revenue leaders orchestrate both technical talent and sales leadership to create competitive advantages. Today, Jamie will share how revenue leaders should architect both technical capabilities

and sales organizations for maximum impact. And also why traditional siloed approaches limit growth and how CROs can build integrated revenue engines within their overall go-to-market strategy. Four themes we'll explore today. Technical as revenue infrastructure, building customer-facing technical capabilities.

sales leadership architecture and designing world-class revenue organizations. let's jump in. And first off, Jamie, again, thanks so much for joining us today.

Jamie (01:58)

No problem. My pleasure.

Mark Petruzzi (02:01)

Awesome. Okay, topic one, technical talent as revenue infrastructure. How do you build customer facing technical capabilities that help supercharge your selling model and your sales effectiveness? So Jamie, most CROs think of technical hiring as someone else's problem until a deal stalls because they don't have the right technical expertise for customer success.

How should revenue leaders think about technical talent as a revenue accelerator?

Jamie (02:33)

Wow, I think, the first thing that comes to me is the fact that we have to, we're in a changing world right now where the AI's presence, technical presence is becoming larger and larger within any organization, whether it be a manufacturing company, whether it be a financial services business, whether it be a sporting company, a media company.

And I think we're getting lost at the moment where we're not understanding how to fuse human beings with technology. And I think that there is almost an air of arrogance and concern around tech and how it can enhance. think too many businesses see it as a cost rather than an aid and assist.

another weapon in the armory. I think there's a big problem at the moment where there was millions and billions and trillions of dollars spent on tech without a real understanding of how to use it or utilize it. And no market is something that we've talked about at great lengths. I think there's businesses that have spent a fortune on tech, whether it be a CRM, a HCM, whatever it might be. And

there really isn't a true understanding of how they can maximize or utilize the technology that they've embedded into their businesses. And I think right now, for me personally, and what I'm seeing in the talent space and what I'm seeing specifically in a lot of partners is that there isn't an understanding of how they can use the tools that they've purchased or brought into the business. And then the partners with the end users,

Whilst there can be a focus a lot of the time on new tools or upgrades, I think there needs to be a slowdown in what people are doing and actually to look at what they've got and how they can maximise that and do they need to bring in talent or...

additional resources to allow them to actually utilize the products that they have or do they need to bring something in to allow that product to work to its fullest capability because so many products at the moment are fusing together. This isn't a one product market. know, every CRM is linking in with 10, 15, 20 different products.

So right now it's, I think it's a question of how can we use, what do we need to use, and then how can we use it to the best of its capabilities? Because I think there's a a huge divide at the moment and lack of understanding.

KK Anderson (04:50)

You know, what's interesting is that so internally, like you're describing for, for your own texts, your own sales tech stack, it's, everyone will tell you it's bloated. You know, it's fragmented. it's all point, you know, pointing to a specific one problem. All of them say they're AI, different kinds of AI. It's just, there's a, there's a million different directions, like you said, that you, that you can go. But when you're hiring.

And when you're staffing for your clients and they're looking for like a sales engineer, right? Or a technical role, even on the customer success side of the go-to-market, someone who will be nurturing that account, working that account from a technical perspective. customers now are demanding more AI capability or different...

I don't know, iteration of different tools and programs to the point where those technical roles are more imperative than ever when it comes to being able to retain or expand an account. So how do you hire for that? What technical roles from a staffing perspective are absolutely critical for a sales organization to have on both sides?

Jamie (06:03)

Well, if you look there's some really good examples at the moment and I won't name companies specifically because I wouldn't be professional, but there's certain GSIs out there that have spent billions of dollars on creating AI platforms that theoretically is taking care of a part of the process, albeit web design and a lot of the administration. But if you look at the upper arcals, the solution architect or a technical architect, this is very much

based upon a human being and their capability and their enhancement of the technology and the AI that they're using or utilizing in the lower echelons of the program. You can't have one without the other. And at the moment, there's so much reliance upon tech in the context that people think it's gonna solve problems. It will, if the people that are using it know what they're Otherwise it won't, it will create more.

So technology, listen, I'm a technophobe, right? It freaks me out every time we get a new piece of software. But the reality of it is if I know how to use it and the people that are teaching me how to use it or implementing it are doing a good job, it's going to enhance my business or me personally. But if I don't know how to use it or I don't know how to utilize it within my business or why it's there, it becomes a problem.

So right now I've seen multiple businesses almost they're going overboard on tech. There's too much tech. It's kind of like slow down, understand what you're using and what you're using it for and how it can enhance your business. And you need people in order to do that. You can't install tech and then the tech, a robot walks into the building and sits next to you and has a chat. people for tech.

don't get me started on the videos of them playing football and falling over and and then falling out of the ring. I mean, ridiculous.

Mark Petruzzi (07:43)

that's great.

Jamie, you brought me right into an area that I wanted to cover before we go too deep in the rest of ⁓ our analysis here. So I wanted everyone to hear that beautiful British accent that you have for the people who don't know you. ⁓ I also should share ⁓ I'm friends with Jamie. So, I don't think he'll that?

Jamie (08:05)

supposed friends.

Mark Petruzzi (08:06)

Exactly. Some days. Exactly. So a couple of things I want to share about Jamie so you see the perspective of kind of how we've been able to build these businesses. Not only is he a brilliant individual, he's got that British accent now, although I guess he's officially American because he was born in the US. He spent a lot of time in the UK, which probably stopped him from getting that NFL contract.

It was a little harder to pull off an NFL contract when you're in the UK for most of your life, but he's played American football. He's really, really good at it. I don't know if you could see it all. ⁓ Well, better than me. So we talk about how he tried and failed at a couple of the opportunities to go in and get in front of NFL teams. And the beauty is he's tried and failed.

I've failed and failed because I've never been in front of an NFL team, although I did play a little college ball. So I share that because, but it comes down to, you know, a lot of us really good sales leaders, recruiting company leaders like you are. We leverage our athletic perspective and idea as well into how we build teams and how we build productivity within our teams.

Let's jump into an example and maybe you can give us an example of when you've had the right technical hire that you help bring, it helped get into an organization and it immediately enabled the sales team to close bigger deals or accelerate their sales cycle as a whole. Talk about the revenue multiplier effect and how important that is. And the last thing I'll say on this before I hand it over to you, Jamie, is the fact that when it comes down to it,

this happens in the services companies we work with over the years. Certainly it happens in the SAS market, the general technology sales side. But man, it's happening in manufacturing companies and med device companies like that technical side of the equation, no matter what your industry and almost all companies other than commoditized organizations. And that's what I really feel like you have.

Such a perspective on that that most of us have never really been able to think about and pull together. So share an example or two there.

Jamie (10:15)

Sure, I'm actually going to share an analogy from football. By the way, I was never good enough to play. I just tried and failed. So thank you. Definitely. I was nowhere near where I needed to be, but it was fun. But a football analogy, when you think about technology and you think about business and how you can utilize that technology for the best for the business to increase revenues and culture capability output.

It's no dissimilar to a football head coach with a playbook. So if you think the playbook is the technology and the people are the players, the playbook only works if the players are correct. And if the playbook is fantastic and the players are terrible, they're still going to be terrible. And if they don't understand the playbook, the plays aren't going to work.

So that's my first analogy. You know, love an analogy. And second of all, the most important thing for me, and I've seen it in multiple businesses, in multiple strains, whether it be a lead generation tool, CRM, a really amazing automation system, they all come back to the same thing in the context that the best products or the best technology

allows you to see your business and what's happening. Whether it be a CRM, Mark, whether it be, the product that we talk about a lot and KK, right? It's about, it's like a greenhouse. The best technology basically just uncovers everything.

So from a sales leader perspective, you can see exactly what's happening. You know, what are people doing? What's the forecast? What's working? What's not working? What's good? What's bad? What's indifferent? How can we push further on this? How can we pull back on that? People should be using technology to understand their businesses first and foremost, before they do anything. Because unless you understand what you're dealing with, everything else is irrelevant because it's like boxing in the dark. I mean,

You're going to swing punches and you're not going to hit anything. So the first thing I would say about technology is allow yourself to have tech that absolutely strips away any blinds, curtains, nets, any darkness. So you can see everything good, bad, ugly, indifferent is irrelevant. Unless you can see what's in front of you, you cannot enhance it. That's my biggest lever with regards to tech.

KK Anderson (12:17)

That's really fascinating. You're describing collective iron, aren't you? though. You have the visibility, the transparency to just be able to see. And a of times, it's what people aren't doing. There are so many hanger-ons. I feel terrible saying that, but I see it all the time. Sellers who are in roles, they're not hitting their quota. They haven't been hitting their quota.

Jamie (12:25)

for sure.

KK Anderson (12:37)

And what do you know? They're not even in, I actually had a coaching call today and the guy I was coaching was like, this guy's ghosting me. He's not calling me back. I'm like, well, how many times have you called him? Once. it's gotta have been more than once. We go look in the CRM. It's been like twice over a three week span. It's like, you know what I mean? And technology just shows you that kind of thing right away.

Jamie (12:58)

mean, it's like it's like having an automation system, right? Which is, which is fantastic and allows you to, you know, keep in contact with people and jogging memory or send an email, all this kind of stuff. And I'm not going to go into it too much, but I have an avid hate for people that don't write their own emails. and I quite like grump grammatical errors because it means that it's been written by somebody but

I have a huge issue with the context that we're looking for so many answers and how we can push our businesses forward, how we can create more revenue, how we can save on cost, how we can get rid of some human beings and replace them with some kind of AI technology. But we don't even know what's happening. We have no idea. We're pushing people and driving people's KPIs within sales environments.

When we don't even know if those KPIs are the important KPIs or the KPIs that are actually going along that journey that result in a sale. We don't know. ⁓ we need to do more of this. Do we? Do you really know that? Have you actually had some kind of transparent view of specifically that KPI? No, you just think you just guess, which, you know, kind of takes me back to the point that I made earlier. How many people are guessing?

Is this a guessing game? Or is this a game where we actually want to know what we're doing? With some kind of outcome. It's crazy. And it's

Mark Petruzzi (14:12)

and then we start guessing with AI and guessing with data as well in some cases.

Jamie (14:18)

look, we look for answers inside of tech, but we don't even know what tech we need. given us this great cell, right? We're on shark tank or whatever it's called. And we're getting blasted with this incredible tool, which could be incredible.

Mark Petruzzi (14:23)

Yeah.

Jamie (14:32)

but we don't even know what's going on inside our business. So why are we going to buy this all? That's weird. That's like, that's like taking your car into a garage and it doesn't work. And somebody comes out with this incredible ratchet set and you go, okay, I'll buy it. But you have no idea what's wrong with your car. It be, it might be the tires. Nuts.

Mark Petruzzi (14:47)

That's incredible. You know what's cool about this and your role, Jamie, as the CEO of Smart for Cloud, as someone who's been and runs some very fast-growing recruiting firms throughout your career, that's where the mindset of what you bring to your clients really adds so much value. You bring that...

technical side of this rather than just sales, you know, the technical component in the evolution and the integration of all that, you bring that those perspectives about technology. And I know you do this for your clients all the time. And we need more of that. We need more individuals who are bringing a function like you are recruiting, but everything else with it.

the strategy, the ideas, the thoughts, you know, and that stuff all comes for free. That's kind of your added value, and I know you built the team that can do that as well. So before we jump to topic two, I just, if there's anything you want to comment on that, if

Jamie (15:48)

I just,

all I'd say to the public is invest in your people. Your people are going to make your business amazing, not some piece of tech or kit that you have no idea what it is. Allow yourself to develop something where you're infusing a great team and a great business with great technology because not one of them is correct. Both of them are.

but you've got to marry them. Otherwise it's going to be a divorce real quick. And you're to be like Henry the eighth with several wives and a lot of deaths. So don't do it.

Mark Petruzzi (16:14)

Yeah, incredible. All

right. So topic two, sales leadership architecture, world-class revenue organizations. KK, do want to kick off a question or two on that?

KK Anderson (16:26)

Sure.

So let's shift to leadership, sales leadership itself, right? And you work with companies every day and you help them hire everything from account executives to chief revenue officers. What is fundamentally different about building sales organizations for a fast moving...

tech, AI company versus like a traditional SaaS or like a legacy model? Is there a differentiator that you're noticing in today's market?

Jamie (16:55)

Wow, that's a great question. Quite honestly, there shouldn't be. There probably is. But the reality of it is that best sales leaders can sell some spangly new piece of AI technology, or they can sell a shoe at Macy's. It doesn't really matter. The reality of it is that...

Sales for me is about presentation. It's the, best set. I've always said this, Mark has heard me say this before. The best sales people don't sell. They present. So they understand the issue that you have through understanding what your business is actually doing, because you understand what your business is doing. And then they will give you the product that you need in order to push your revenue and push your business forward. The best sales teams and the best sales leaders will always do one thing first. And that's create a culture.

because everything else pales into insignificance. People work for businesses because of culture. People work for leaders because of culture. People get up in the morning with a smile on their face because of culture. People go home at night and don't mind thinking about having to work the next day because of culture. Create a business around culture, not around anything else. It's irrelevant. anything in the history of the world that's been successful, Richard Branson,

KK Anderson (17:51)

what you're selling. I love that answer. That was the right answer, Jamie.

Jamie (17:58)

I know you're going to ask me a question in a bit and I'm sorry to stick this in there, but it's really important. Richard Branson, only a number of years ago, sat inside a board meeting and looked at his CFO and said, what's the difference between turnover and GP? That my friends is the answer. He...

is a multi-billionaire made more money than anything because of the culture that he created with Virgin still to this day and he didn't even know the difference between turnover and GP what a legend

Mark Petruzzi (18:25)

Well, the beauty,

Jamie, he takes that culture and he's just put it into different industries, into into record production, like one to the next.

Jamie (18:30)

everything.

radio, TV,

But he built every single business on two things, on culture and hearts and minds leadership. That was his, yeah, that was his thing.

Mark Petruzzi (18:44)

Well, it's very similar to how you run your Yeah, the profits aren't as high, but it There you go. Okay, next question here. So when revenue leaders are from 10 million to 100 million ARR, or with a lot of the service companies that you work with,

they're not managing around ARR. They're driving their bookings, their delivery. ⁓ But it's all coming together, right? A lot of the GSIs that you work with now is spending a lot of their time trying to create and build products and bring them to market as well. So ⁓ what's your framework on like helping your clients determine the right leadership structure? And how do you

help them to avoid the pitfalls of over hiring or under investing in their leadership side of the equation?

Jamie (19:38)

good question, I think there's a couple of things. think first of all, you need to understand where they want, what the destination is, So the destination from an immediacy.

six months, 12 months, two years, five years, but where are we trying to get to? And what do we need in order to get there? But I think it's always easier, easier as a leader. And in fact, it's easier as just as a salesperson, right? Start at the end. Don't start at the beginning, but go over here. Cause it's way easier to go backwards than it is forwards. Because if you understand the destination, then you can then work out the periodic steps that are required in order to get there, right?

If I'm speaking to a business, it's always a case of okay, right? This is what you're doing You know, there was a particular GSI worked with for a number of years Fantastic people an incredible leader and it was always about okay. This is the number What's the end result how do we how do we need to look here what do we need to look like here?

What do we need to do in order to get here? Whether it be candidate experience, whether it be, you know, putting together some software with regards to, you know, giving that to the candidates prior to them going on the journey with the client. was a numerous things, but unless you understand what it is you're trying to achieve, then it's really difficult to sit there and go, okay, I was reading something the other day about somebody saying that

They wanted to create an environment that was basically within recruitment, within talent solutions, where they wanted to have a business that was producing more revenue than any other business per person or per head.

I mean, you might as well go and make your tea in a chocolate teapot because how on earth are you going to... unless you have some sort of software that I have no idea about where you can look at every business on earth, which is impossible. When you look at things like that, I mean, that's just words. That's just smoke, right? It doesn't mean anything.

They need to understand what they need, what they want to achieve personally. It's irrelevant what everyone else is doing. It doesn't matter. It's about what they want to achieve. We want to get to X. Okay, cool. What do you need in order to do that? Do you need to get a new CRM? Do you need to bring in, you know, more AI specific technology? Whatever it might be, right? Do you need to spend more money on marketing, the website, whatever it might be, but you need to understand specifically what the goal is.

Not, I'd like us to be successful and I want us to be the best and I want us to be the greatest. it's all that stuff. honestly, it's just words. And I think that the more ingrained people can get in their core mission and the end destination and what that end destination is with facts.

with numbers, locations, people, whatever, right? Whatever your business is, you have to understand the destination. If you don't know the destination, go and think about it and work out where that destination is. And it doesn't mean that the destination can't change because it can. And it often does when we hit with things like COVID or, you know, political kind of scenarios that were affecting certain economies or certain sectors.

Things change, but you have to have something. Have your destination. Understand what that destination is. Otherwise, don't get started.

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In this episode of Selling the Cloud, Stephen Messer, co-founder of Collective[i] and LinkShare, shares a bold and timely vision for the future of sales—one that trades CRM inefficiencies, seller churn, and impersonal cadences for AI-powered intelligence, real buyer relationships, and a return to value-based growth.

Stephen unpacks how Collective[i] is building the world’s first economic foundation model for B2B sales—a neural network that learns from billions in live market signals and transforms the way companies forecast, prioritize, and engage. If you’re leading a revenue team, this episode will challenge how you think about data, your CRM, and the very structure of your go-to-market engine.

What You’ll Learn:

• The Real Cost of Today’s Sales Stack: Why CRM-driven workflows have created inefficiency, seller burnout, and buyer distrust.
• How Collective[i] Works: The power of neural networks that learn from shared, anonymized go-to-market activity—while keeping client data private and secure.
• Cruelty in Sales (and How to Fix It): A raw and honest take on how modern sales workflows punish reps and buyers—and how AI can fix it.
• The End of Data Entry: How Collective[i] automates pipeline visibility and eliminates the need for reps to “feed the system.”
• The Rise of Relationship-Centric Growth: Why trust, storytelling, and insight—not spam—will win in the next generation of GTM.

Key Topics:

• What’s wrong with current sales tech (and why it’s unsustainable)
• How Collective[i] trains its neural net to understand real buying behavior
• The shift from CRM-driven sales to AI-first revenue intelligence
• “Lifeguards” and the shadow sellers that make or break deals
• Why buyer relationships have eroded—and how to rebuild them
• The moral case for better GTM design
• Real examples of AI uncovering hidden pipeline risk
• Why average sellers will become exceptional (or obsolete) with AI

Guest Spotlight: Stephen Messer

Stephen is the Co-Founder of Collective[i], a next-gen AI platform reinventing how companies forecast, collaborate, and close. He’s also known for co-founding LinkShare, the affiliate marketing pioneer acquired by Rakuten for $425M. A seasoned entrepreneur and thought leader, Stephen now leads Collective[i] in building the world’s first neural network for B2B sales.

Resources & Mentions:

• Collective[i] – Website
• CI Forecast: Collective[i]’s weekly go-to-market leadership event
• Book mentioned: Predictable Revenue (and its long-term impact on sales culture)
• Topics discussed: AI-powered forecasting, seller efficiency, CRM alternatives, cadence fatigue, relationship rebuilding, data trust models

Listen now and follow Selling the Cloud for more unfiltered GTM insights from the leaders shaping the future of sales.

Mark Petruzzi (00:00)

Welcome everyone to Selling the Cloud, the podcast where we decode the art and science of B2B selling in the ever-bombing world of SaaS. I'm your co-host, Mark Petruzzi. And I'm KK Anderson, excited to join you on this journey where each week we explore the strategies, insights, and experiences of some of the most innovative thought leaders in the world of sales today.

Welcome to today's episode of Selling the Cloud podcast. We are beyond excited to have Stephen Messer, co-founder of Collective Eye with us today. For those unfamiliar with Stephen, he co-founded LinkShare, which revolutionized affiliate marketing and 10 years ago, co-founded Collective Eye with his amazing sister, Heidi Messer and brother-in-law, Tad Martin.

Together they've created the world's first economic foundation model that studies how the world buys and sells. It's a groundbreaking development that is completely disrupting the sales landscape. Their neural network has roughly 5 % of the world's GDP under advisement today and growing rapidly. So what makes Collectivize so revolutionary? It is its deep learning and natural language processing

that allows predictive insights to come forward to sales teams with amazing precision. It boosts productivity and it delivers clean, powerful data back into CRM systems. This is a true game changer for sales organizations. It enables teams to make smarter data-driven decisions and scale effectively. This episode is packed with valuable insights for sales leaders, so be sure to grab a pen and take notes.

You'll probably want to listen more than once as well. Here are three objectives for today's episode. Steven, to learn how you and your amazing team has built the most powerful neural network in sales tech, creating competitive advantages for your clients, what it means to become an AI-charged selling organization, and why that's crucial for sales teams today, and why traditional CRM data

is often inaccurate and how it impacts sales effectiveness and how CollectiVie is cleaning up CRM data across your client base. Steven, let's dive in. You've had an incredible career from founding Lynx Air to now leading the charge at CollectiVie. Can you walk us through how you got to where you are today and what has led you up to being a guest here on Selling in the Cloud?

Well, thank you for first of all, thanks for having me here and thank you for letting me reach your audience. I know how important your audience is and I'm excited to have the opportunity to talk with them. So going back in time, you know, I've been fortunate enough to work with my sister and now my brother-in-law. I think all of us have one thing in common, which is we grew up in a world where revenue is really important. My father passed away when I was very young. My mother took over the family business.

that they had created together, which was a corporate maintenance business. We literally cleaned offices and from a very young age, we would sit around the table talking about what it takes to make sure that we could make it through another week. And for anyone here who's listening, almost all people I know who are involved in sales found their way there in some way, or form, because they were willing to take the risk to grow something and make something more meaningful for their family. So.

Whether it LinkShare, which is really just a commission-based selling on the web, which we started in 1996 and sold to Rockington in 2006, or Collective Eye today, which is really to support for collective intelligence to help sales professionals and revenue organizations really upgrade. I think the one commonality was freeing up people from the fear of what it takes to make the number that they need to, to support their family.

and also providing a better service for their customers, which all entrepreneurs think about endlessly. Wow. Stephen, can you walk us through, you know, what were some of the, what did it take and what were some of the challenges of building this incredible neural net that you've built here at CollectorEye? You know, it always seems obvious after 10 years of struggle. I think when we started the business 10 years ago, we began

on this concept of first principles, which is, okay, you have a new technology neural nets. Now this is before chat, GBT became popular. ⁓ but we, we would look back and said, okay, this is a powerful technology. It's going to change the landscape, but it operates a lot differently. One of the things that needs the massive data set to learn. And for those who don't know, chat, GBT is great. Anthropics great, but they're for the most part studying language.

So they're really good mimics of how the world operates. It's auto fill to the max. Let's put it that way. But they're not able to learn everything. And in many ways, it's a general type of, ⁓ or a very narrow type of intelligence as opposed to general intelligence that humanity has. So we look back and said, okay, could you apply this to Adam Smith's problem of the invisible hand, which is the economy operates in a way that you can't... ⁓

follow. But if you could follow, you could optimize it. And we had some early examples. ⁓ If you go back 10 years and you look at Uber, you might have said, okay, let's get this straight. You've got a web app that's going to connect supply and demand around livery, car service. ⁓ How are they going to be able to maximize and operate the entire world of taxis, ⁓ rental cars, ⁓ you name it. ⁓ And here we are 10 years later and

Not only have they done that, but they've optimized to make sure cars are in the right place, that they're getting the right fee, that the good drivers are getting the best passengers. They have done this very quickly and they really leverage a lot of neural nets to help figure out everything from pricing to matching. And we looked and said, okay, early on, this is a proof point that if you can aggregate enough of a particular economy in one place, you could really optimize it. Now everyone said, no one's going to share data. Nobody would do that. In fact, I

I would bet there are people on this call who are watching this video who are saying, yeah, my company would never do that. But we look back at first principles said, do people do this already? And sure enough, if you look at almost every company today, not only do they do it, but they do it in the majority of the way they operate their business. I'll give an example. Would you ever lend or extend credit to a customer based on their payment history to you alone?

I mean, if you want to get fired, you would, but almost always you go to a credit bureau. And what do you do a credit bureau? You give this neutral third party a history of how everyone's paid you. They combine it with all their customers and they give you back a credit score back. Now it doesn't give anyone's history away. It keeps everything confidential. Yeah, that works. We do it in Google every day. You do a Google search. Trust me. They see all of your competitors searches, the companies they're looking for, the people they're trying to find. Same thing with LinkedIn.

That happens. You do that with advertising. Your advertiser on one hand is being bought through Google and trying to leverage their network to find the right buyers and other places like that. And we do that happily with lead gen. We do that happily in all the places we are at. But then it comes into our company and we say, no, we can't do that. The only revenue groups have done that. And in exchange, they end up being the most expensive portion of the business with the least results.

And so we said, that's got to change. And so for 10 years we've gone out and we now work with some of largest companies in the world, regulated around the world. ⁓ And sure enough, when they do their details, they realize not only is this more secure, not only is this better, but it enables us to have better returns. And that's sort of the flywheel effect that has made our business grow so quickly. Yeah. You know what? It's, it's been amazing to, to watch you build this over the years and to see how these large companies

with all their attorneys and everything else have dove in. And it all comes down to the way you keep all this data blinded and private. But what it brings is this amazing data when you can put it together in this kind of way is so much better than just one company's data. And it's also so much more impactful.

because as you build this into this amazing neural network, it's really, I guess it's all about the data and not about the data all wrapped up into one. Meaning it's about what this data together in this combined collective way can help you do for your clients and help you really predict what's going to happen next with your clients. So can we go little deeper into that and how does it really

to give a competitive advantage when you have this kind of data and you have this type of intelligence behind you, AI intelligence behind your go-to-market, what does that do and how do you create these sustainable competitive advantages that you're helping your clients drive every day?

Well, let's start with something that I think is important. There's a lot of leaders. You reach probably the best leaders of almost any group of I've ever come encountered. And what I think is hard for them to fathom in this change is the recognition of the amount of cruelty that the current model pushes on employees and customers. Let's cover that. And then I'm going to talk about what it does to change things.

Because I would argue there's a lot of your leaders that are listening to this thinking, what do you mean? I'm not cruel at all. You know, this is just how it's done. But there is a huge amount of cruelty. Let's start with the sellers and the revenue organization. Think about the cruelty of asking somebody to go in, log everything they do every day, non-revenue producing their commission based sellers, go in there, log what they do, find the people that they're supposed to talk to, try to hope to turn leads into something meaningful.

and basically prospect all day long when we know for a fact that 85 % of revenue comes from references and referrals.

Think about the cruelty of asking them to learn how each different group buys as if they're Columbus or Magellan. Now we know about Columbus and Magellan because they survived the risky journey. But there are a lot of explorers that did not, and we do not know their names. And if you think about sales today, the average churn rate in a sales organization is 35%. There is a cruelty to everybody involved.

in setting people up for that kind of failure rate. If you think about your customer, it's even worse. And you know this, we have bombarded them. We have machine gunned them to death with communications. To try to get to the 15 % of prospects we don't know, we are willing to destroy our brands and our reputations by bombarding them with these cadence tools and bombardment tools to the point where they now hide from us.

And I will tell you, we call it cadence when we send it, but it's spam when we receive it.

And you cannot change those terms. Why do I say that's cruel? Think about a customer today. Well, let's go back 20 years when sales was a relationship driven event. I promise you for every leader that's listening to this call today, they remember a time when, when there were events, they were invited by their customers to join dinners. Frankly, in revenue, we were the most fun people. We had connections to everyone.

We knew about every job opening and we knew everything that was going on in the companies. And like McKinsey or BCG consultants, we knew what was being successful and our customers appreciated our ability to share insights that we had gleaned from an overall market. They valued the time we spent with them. We built relationships. We took them with us over time. We kept them honored. It was our job to make sure that the rest of the company delivered the results and those buyers

We it because we helped them become more successful and grow their careers. And the more we helped them, the more they helped us back. Here we are today. They hide from us on Slack. They hide from us on groups. They have groups together where they tell us we're not allowed to join. When there are events, they try to hide from us in every way possible. We are no longer invited to them. When we try to invite them to speak, they don't want to speak to us. When we give them advice, they think it's biased.

They do not see us as the partner they used to see us as. If that is not cruelty to everybody involved, I do not know how to help you. So AI offers us a chance to change all of this. And I think when we think about the network that Collective Eye has built and the community that we are building, it is to look and say it is our job not to go to the lowest value.

And in fact, I think all these cadence tools have driven us to how do we get cheaper? I see the newest thing is AI SDRs. And don't get me wrong, I'm in AI, but trying to drive down the price to bombard people means our results are so bad that the only way to keep that up is bombard in even more ways than possible. And if we haven't driven our customers into hiding, I don't know what else we can do to do it. Rather than go low value.

We must embrace providing higher value to our partners. And that's really what AI is all about. And can I give one last example? I going too long? We need for you. No, please do. Keep going. I think the current sales stack of all these technologies are the way we tried to mass produce, you know, a revenue funnel in the last 15, 20 years. I think what that has done.

is move us into this role of how many activities can we do? How cheaply to get whatever conversion rate we'll take. And I can tell you coming from e-commerce that never worked there. In fact, it's gone the exact opposite. Whether you look at influencer marketing, et cetera, it is really about how to connect to our customers and offer value. So we think we're about to go through a massive switch with AI where instead of trying to get the mediocre to be average, which is the old sales staff.

How do I use MedPic or medic or whatever, all these things to try to force everyone to be exactly the same. I think we're going to go and start moving because AI takes average people and makes them exceptional. And that's the mission we're on. If we fail, mark my words in 10 years, sales will no longer exist. People will do product led growth because if customers don't want to talk to people anymore, that's the only option they have left.

And I think that'd a shame. Wow. You know, I think of AI as personally, you know, as someone who's been in this landscape for 20 years, as the great equalizer. Right. It takes some of the mundane processes of doing sales every day and just does it for you. Right. And it's incredible. It's almost like having like a

little Jarvis on your shoulder, right? Like Tony Stark, know he's, you know, we talked about him yesterday on your Collective Eye forecast, but it's just incredible that you're right. takes a good salesperson and makes him extraordinary. Right? Well, think about yourself. Like you guys were early adopters of this. So you may realize something that your market may not, which is today,

Part of the reason why the skills of the current group of sellers over the last 15 years has really destroyed relationship building. It's destroyed the ability to actually understand a customer's needs. Like we talk about all these things we use to work hard to train people, but you know, there's a funny thing when, when they did studies this year to look at the, do what they call functional MRIs of the brain, what they realized was our spatial skills shrink. So now we have this GPS.

that tells us where we go, all that skill sets disappearing in our brains. We used to need it, right? If you were going from the East to the West on a horseback, you kind of needed to know you were going West, or if you ended up North, it would get cold fast, right? So we had these skills that all humans had, but it was lost. And what it shows you is when you don't use these skills, it goes away. A lot of the sales stack in the way over 15 years, and I frankly blame this book called ⁓ Repetitive Revenue or Predictable Revenue.

I forget the name of the book. I read it years ago that everyone got all hooked on, which is like, we're going to mass manufacturing sales. And what it did was it sort of said, just do these things. And if you do these things, you'll win. And all these things work when you're the first one doing them until everybody does the same thing and they all have low value. Then it goes to zero. And that's sort of what's happening. And if you look at your STRs, if you look at your newer sellers, when you say build a relationship with them, they look at you and say, does that mean like click on LinkedIn?

No, it does not. For anyone who's been around a long time, you know, relationship building is about trust. How do you add value? And KK, you said it yourself. We do an event at Collective Eye for our community called CI Forecast. You can go to ciforecast.com and see it. And every single week we bring the world's greatest leaders. Yesterday, you came to Michael Useland, the guy who brought us Batman in the movie theaters. Well, all right. He talked about storytelling, a skill that sales professionals have had for years.

Now we give them scripts to read. It's a big different from being a storyteller to an actor. And for anyone on the other side, it's easy to spot the difference between someone who can make a complex story simple and someone who's reading a script, but doesn't understand what they're saying. This is an example of some of that skills that I think we've lost that we have to regain because customers want to reach out to people that add value that can make a complex story simple.

They definitely don't want to talk to someone who's reading a script anymore.

Well, I'm going to go and I'm going to use this time now to lodge a complaint against Steven you and collective I. My complaint is, you know, having, as you mentioned, being become an early adopter and a huge fan of everything you do at Collective I, I have kind of ⁓ I've lost in some ways my ability to speak.

with my prospects, not my clients because they're there with me, but new prospects. And here's a little bit of a backdrop on it. Early in my life, I actually was able to take some great courses in college, high school, in Spanish, and then later on Italian as well. And I was looking to learn both the languages for different reasons, travel I wanted to do in the future.

And what I learned, traveling to Italy and Spain and other parts of the world that speak those languages, that I no longer spoke Spanish or Italian. I spoke this version of Spatialian, would be the best way I could describe it. Which what it would do, it would allow me to communicate in these countries, but for the most part, there would be individuals, especially if it was like a teenager hearing me, that would giggle.

when I would say that, you know, I would say my sentence, which would be this version. So my point back to collective I is I feel like I'm speaking Spatialian a little bit in that I have learned now through you and your team and the great work we've done with our clients together that there's a new way to think about sales. And it's not about the old CRM way. It's about thinking about the future and it's about thinking of

even data, data that you're gonna be generating today and tomorrow, not data you generated three years ago. And I find myself, like I said, sometimes I move too quickly with my prospects and they're not there yet. So over time, I've learned how to do this. I've learned to communicate a little better along the way.

But I've got to blame that all on you because I see the world from a selling perspective very differently than I did two or three years ago. So I guess maybe we can, you know, flush that out a little bit more. Tell us more of your points of view on that. And then you could probably even describe this better than I do. How do you use the new capabilities and products like Collective Eye to really build more effective selling organizations?

Look mark, you're 100 % right. There is a CRM paradigm mentality which thinks about things as failstacks And so the first part of this this blog this podcast was really about what's changed Let's get into the details here of the meat of what's going on for the second half of the podcast Which is really the value which is okay What has changed or you it's easy to say there's a CRM paradigm and then there's an AI paradigm And sometimes that sounds like marketing speak. Let's get right into it, right?

In the CRM paradigm, what you're doing is you're typically trying to compartmentalize what people are doing into one tool, training them on that tool and having that tool do what it's doing. What that in theory means from a data perspective is you have silos of data where you have partial information. AI's changed that whole paradigm. says the whole stack goes away. What we're looking for is every interaction of everybody who's involved in this revenue endeavor.

Whether that be new business, whether it be a renewal business, whether that be upsell or cross sell, or generally relationships across a large organization in different regions. There is a relationship that you and your organization have with the customer. It says to you, how do I figure out what's going on? Well, the first thing is it watches and helps by observing what's going on. You hit the nail on the head. This concept of entering data by people with paid.

licenses and I only bring up the paid licenses because it means there's a whole bunch of shadow people that you didn't buy licenses for that you're just not capturing data on and saying, it's okay. That goes away in AI. And in fact, just so your users know, because our, even our revenue model will seem weird to them. There are no paid licenses for individual users. It is completely complimentary. If you come from the SaaS world, you've got to think I've lost my mind.

But if you come from the AI world, you don't want to lower the data quality by creating economic incentives to stop good data. So can I give an example? We call the group of sellers that never get to be seen, the shadow group, we call them lifeguards. Now you might ask, what do I mean by lifeguard? Well, I look and say, here's the deal.

If all you do is study the most active people in the pool, you get a picture of the pool that is fine, right? Those are in your world, the sellers, but there are a few people that don't get in the pool often, but when they do, they really matter. That's the lifeguard, right? When the lifeguard jumps in the pool, it paints a very different picture of what's happening in that pool than you would have thought before. But if you're not tracking them because you say, ⁓ they're not in the pool often. Why should I buy license that mattered? Well, then I don't really care.

But you get a different view of the world in our world, lawyers, finance people, sometimes client success people, sometimes ⁓ a friend who knows this buyer or a board member. These are people that aren't in the pool often, but when they are, ⁓ boy, it matters. And you want to know what's going on and it can change the outcome today. People essentially try to cost manage those licenses down.

And so they don't get access to that. In particular, one group that you know well matters. You do deal with a partner. Each one's got their own CRM. No one knows what's going on in the other guy. But what if I can just invite my partner in at no cost and they can join even one opportunity at no cost where the AI then observes their activities and captures it for you to work together on. This kind of way of thinking not only

improves data quality, but it also provides a better view into how everybody's working together, where the risks are, how you can work together and help each other out in a way that's never been done before. That's an example very simply of this AI mindset shift. Yeah, I love it. I know you can. let me I guess let's let me just unleash a little more here there from the standpoint of you.

you know, our audience knows that we work really hard to not just talk about products or companies that we're presently working at. And I know you always, you bring so much more general information to the podcast that you go on because you are such a forward thinker in all this. But I'm gonna...

just take us a little deeper into CollectivEye because I just feel it's so relevant and this is something I would feel remiss if I didn't do. So when you look at what can be done now with a product like ⁓ CollectivEye, there is all of that stuff that you described that sales reps dread doing, that information that they would put into a CRM and

the time that they spend, you all these latest two research studies that I've seen, and both of these have happened in the last 12 to 18 months, both Gardner and also Salesforce did amazing studies where they tried to just document where sales reps were spending their time. And they found, and they both came up with a very similar number, somewhere around 30 %...

was all they were selling in any given week or given month. And the rest of the time was inputting data and giving updates to sales leaders and different, you know, five different levels of an organization if they're in a big enough company. So take us a little deeper into, you know, how easy that is to take that and turn that equation around with leveraging a product like Collective Eye.

And how excited do these sales reps get when all of this information is done in an automated fashion for them and they then get to jump onto a system like Electabye and use that in a strategic way and forget about what the sales managers and CRO gets to do at their levels. So take us a little deeper. want to kind of take a little bit of our hand cuts off here.

So let's go back to that cruelty. mean, the good thing about cruelty is when you remove it, changes the, the, the way you think about the problem. So, so there are two pieces. So for any of the leaders who are listening to this call today, they're going to think, okay, how big of a deal is it? Half my sales team doesn't do it. I we even called it rigor. Like we had terms for these things, but the nice thing about part about AI is that we are able to, remove that work. Instantaneously without retraining a sales team.

We do this by connecting to the APIs of all the digital technologies they use today, but we can do it behind the scenes. We can do it in a GDPR compliant way. We can do with high security and what we can do it in a way where it changes the nature of the paradigm. There's two challenges you need to overcome to solve your data quality issues. The first is you need a powerful neural net to understand how to follow the rules around the world of privacy correctly.

That's the first one. And you have to find a way where you don't need to train sellers to do things. The second thing is you've got to reward people who use the application to make sure that they're not hiding information deals that they don't want listed out there. So we solve that by making sure that one, the work is done automatically behind the scenes. It's quick. It's easy. It's reliable. It's safe.

The second thing is every time a seller opens an opportunity, they immediately get unique insights that we have learned from our network that they can apply to winning a new deal. There's got to be a reward for sharing information for the seller. And that it's not simply about getting data automated. There has to be a reward. I always talk about all to all these privacy people out there who always worried about data.

my God, we have to make sure that people don't use cookies. And if you spent time in Europe, you know, if you try to go on a website, you have to go through 16 clicks just to get past the cookie approval. I don't think it's about lack of knowledge. I think it's a lack of value. In America, we will give all of our information to our supermarket in exchange for coupons. We have no problem because we're getting a value in exchange for giving up data for sellers. It's the same thing. We've got to provide value to those sellers.

so that when they will have information, they want to update you sooner about it, as opposed to punishing sellers by trying to do things that hurt them. And Collectivy does that by immediately giving insights that they can leverage, that they want to get earlier to win more business.

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

In Part 2 of this Selling the Cloud conversation, Josh Payne dives deeper into the future of AI-first growth teams, and how CoFrame is helping B2B orgs replace legacy handoffs and static workflows with continuously learning, automated systems.

Josh shares how teams are deploying AI to automate experimentation, generate code, and even shape strategy in real time. He outlines what it takes to build with AI in production (not just in prompts), how roles like “growth engineer” are evolving, and why building competitive advantage in 2025 means more than just adding ChatGPT to your stack.

What You’ll Learn:

• How AI Is Reshaping Growth Roles: Why marketers are evolving into orchestrators, engineers, and agents of optimization.
• Beyond Prompting—Toward Infrastructure: How CoFrame builds stable, repeatable workflows with AI that can learn, adapt, and improve continuously.
• Real-World Agent Use Cases: From UI code generation to multivariate testing and funnel orchestration, Josh shares how real AI agents are driving results.
• Why Speed > Strategy (Sometimes): Why fast learning cycles and live tests can outperform static GTM plans.
• How to Start Now: Advice for teams getting started with AI-based systems—without needing a research lab.

Key Topics:

• AI in modern GTM orgs
• Code agents vs. code generation
• Automating testing, design, and targeting
• The rise of “quant growth” as a function
• Breaking down silos with intelligent workflows
• When to trust AI—and when not to
• CoFrame’s real-world implementation stories
• GTM roles of the future: orchestrators vs. operators

Guest Spotlight: Josh Payne

Josh Payne is CEO of CoFrame and a leading voice at the intersection of AI, UX, and growth strategy. A repeat founder and AI researcher, he previously created GPT-Migrate and led growth products at top SaaS and fintech companies. His mission: make the web feel intelligent again.

Resources & Mentions:

• Website: CoFrame
• Concepts: AI agents, orchestration layers, living interfaces, growth stacks
• Tech Stack Mentions: GPT-4, Claude, OpenAI fine-tuning, VWO, Retool

🎧 Listen now and follow Selling the Cloud for more GTM conversations on scaling with AI, orchestrating growth, and building what’s next.

Mark Petruzzi (00:02)

Welcome to today's episode of Selling the Cloud podcast. We are excited to welcome Josh Payne, founder and CEO of CoFrame. Josh is a serial entrepreneur and AI pioneer who has co-founded multiple successful companies, including Autograph, a 2 billion plus unicorn backed by A16Z and Access Bell, which has been acquired by Tata.

He's also the creator of GPT Migrate, one of the first popular coding agents and has authored over 20 papers and patents in AI. At CoFrame, Josh is building the future of digital interfaces, websites and apps that continuously optimize themselves using AI. The company recently raised 9.3 million from Coastal Ventures.

and partnered with OpenAI to develop breakthrough UI code generation technology that's driving a 30 % plus improvement in conversion rates for mid-market and enterprise clients alike. Today, Josh will share how AI agents are revolutionizing growth marketing and website optimization, what it means to build living interfaces, and how go-to-market teams should prepare for the autonomous

optimization era that we are in today. So welcome, Josh, welcome.

Josh (01:31)

Thanks so much for having me, Mark. Good to see you.

Mark Petruzzi (01:33)

Excellent. Thank you. Okay, four themes we'll focus on today. From static to living, the AI powered interface revolution, the OpenAI partnership building visually grounded AI at scale, autonomous growth, how AI agents are replacing manual optimization, and the future of marketing technology and growth engineering. So first area here, Josh, for us to jump into.

You describe CoFrame as creating living interfaces rather than static websites. What's fundamentally broken about how we think about digital experiences today?

Josh (02:15)

Yeah, so the problem with digital experiences as we know them, it comes on both sides. There's the problem from the business side, which is that it takes a lot of effort to make these digital experiences like websites or apps better for our customers. And people tend to spend a lot of money and time doing so. On the customer side, it's also an issue because you have these experiences that are one size fits all. They're not adaptive. They're not personal, you know?

They lack the context of you as a person. And the way that we're approaching this is the problem is, let's think about this from the ground up. If you could redesign the concept of digital interfaces today in a world where AI is possible and as powerful as it is, you know, look at the trend of where things are going in terms of the capabilities that it has. How would you design these customer experiences?

And that was really our impetus, which was, let's think about a world in which these digital interfaces were living in a sense, they could be adaptive and personal from the ground up. And so what we're doing essentially is, is enabling that capability for the businesses that we work with and their customer experiences, allowing their, their teams to not have to do all that grunt work and trying to continuously stay on top of.

⁓ of making those customer experiences better at great cost and ⁓ great time.

KK Anderson (03:51)

Like, what would a use case be or an example, just to go a little deeper into living interfaces? I think it sounds amazing.

Josh (03:59)

Absolutely. The biggest one that we focus on at the moment is website optimization. So you're probably very familiar with the idea of websites being a conduit for which consumers can interact and transact. And the problem with websites today is that, like I was mentioning, it takes a lot of effort to improve the conversion rate ⁓ of these sites. 95 % of

plus of traffic on the internet doesn't convert, right? It's people who go to a website and they check it out and they decided that maybe it's not a fit for them or they don't get the punchline, they don't get the idea. And this is truer in other industries than it is, know, for instance, in e-commerce, this is a huge, huge problem because the website is everything, right? And, you know, consumer finance tends to be a big one as well. And so,

What you end up seeing is ⁓ these teams spending a lot of time running experiments on these websites. You'll have a product manager or a marketer come up with a concept or an idea of what to test. They'll pass that on to a designer. They'll come up with designs and concepts. They'll then go and pass that on to an engineering team, which will go and implement the idea to be tested in the website. And that handoff process, that whole process takes weeks, sometimes months.

to do. And just an insane amount of time, when you look at the dollar value of time, an insane amount of cost and headcount. ⁓ And so it's a very broken process. It's still very beneficial and valuable, because every win that you get, every better version of that experience, tends to give you significantly more revenue, because you're stacking those conversions over time. You start to see the compounding benefits.

It's really, really painful. so the use case here that we're very focused on at CoFrame, at least, is bringing this idea of adaptive, personalized websites where different people can have different experiences that are suited to them to really help to increase that end KPI that the business cares about, usually a conversion KPI.

Mark Petruzzi (06:20)

So Josh, you have built multiple successful companies in different paradigms. What made you pivot from traditional SaaS to this AI-first approach with CoFrame?

Josh (06:35)

Yeah, I mean, this is a big question a lot of operators are facing right now, which is, how is the role of software going to evolve in this world of AI? I think we're seeing the commoditization of software. starting to see, on the flip side, we're seeing a lot of incredible new capabilities that AI is enabling. I actually think that one of the biggest opportunities right now in the space overall, in the world, is

taking processes that are manual and take a lot of work and then applying ⁓ sort of an AI first mindset to that to figure out how can we automate or optimize different parts of that process and then deliver that outcome with way less effort involved. So an example here of what we're doing, know, conversion optimization, like I was saying, that kind of takes, you know, design and engineering and product management and a bunch of different manual functions that are tedious. And so

Our approach was, can we break down that whole long process that is delivering the outcome, which is basically experiments for your website and use AI to significantly accelerate and then automate that ⁓ end to end. Now there's still human involvement for sure. And there's, there's like a gradient of, of involvement, right? But on the level of completely manual to completely automated, we're gradually moving toward that automation piece. And I think that that's.

really the biggest opportunity currently in the world of AI is looking at what is currently manual and trying to figure out systematically how can we automate that and ⁓ make it not as painful ultimately.

KK Anderson (08:17)

So really interesting. where in your professional opinion do most companies go wrong when they're trying to optimize their websites and their digital experiences? And I heard what you said earlier. And by the way, once four to eight weeks have passed and the new website is launched, that content is stale. there you are going back at it again.

Talk to me about where they go wrong and how you recommend that they shift.

Josh (08:53)

Yeah, so

I mean, a big thing that I see a lot is people are just not testing enough. know, there's that when you look at the math behind conversion optimization and experimentation, it's pretty astounding. you know, if you like, think about ⁓ a series of tests that you run, you find a couple of wins within those tests. It's not like those wins are going to give you, you know, a boost of revenue for that month and then you're done. No, that win stays with you for good, for the most part.

And they also compound over time. So if you find a 2 % conversion left here, a very small left here, you know, and then a 5 % over here, and then a 3 % over there, you suddenly have 10 % in aggregate conversion left. That could be 10 % more revenue, you know, over the course of forever. Right. And so that comp, that's why compounding is so powerful here, because you start to be able to see, you know, this like, this, this, this super linear growth.

⁓ of your business value.

Mark Petruzzi (09:56)

Yeah, what I love about that, Josh, is you're kind of taking us to continuous, instead of periodic testing. it's just, and that's the beauty of AI and it's the beauty of the intelligence that it's building in some of these large language models that, like you said, it compounds, they get better, they get smarter, and that's phenomenal. And, you know, I guess we're putting the A-B test out of

Josh (10:05)

Yes, exactly.

Mark Petruzzi (10:26)

at a commission at this point, because unless you want to look at it as A-B testing 24-7. yeah, so ⁓ what's the first thing a growth leader should understand about moving from this periodic optimization to this continuous AI-driven improvement?

Josh (10:32)

Yeah, A to Z testing.

KK Anderson (10:35)

Yeah.

Josh (10:46)

Yeah, so first thing is just like a mindset shift, right? A-B testing is valuable and it has its place. And you can still compound those wins over time with A-B testing. ⁓ We are now living in a world where the cost of creating new experiments is very low. So what I like to usually think through ⁓ when it comes to opportunities in the AI space is we talked a lot about automation, right?

like taking something that is manual and autumny. I think that's the biggest opportunity currently. ⁓ Now, there's another piece of this, which I think is also very valuable, we think of that a lot, which is what wasn't possible before that is now possible. So net new superhuman capabilities. So first is taking a human capability and then just performing that. And then the second bucket is

taking something that just wasn't possible before or feasible or reasonable to do and doing that. And so continuous optimization actually falls in that second bucket. The first bucket being here's how people are optimizing today with A-B testing. And we're just going to automate that. The second bucket is what new types of tests are now possible with AI. And I'll give you a simple example of this. ⁓

KK Anderson (11:54)

The superhuman?

Josh (12:11)

⁓ Let's see, Booking.com is actually probably one of the closest to this. They're a really, really advanced company when it comes to growth and optimization. They're running a thousand plus experiments at any given time. ⁓ But with their level of traffic, they could be running probably tens of thousands of experiments at any given time. ⁓ That's just not feasible to do ⁓ with ⁓ purely with human labor, right? It would just not make sense from an economic standpoint of time spent.

KK Anderson (12:34)

humans.

Josh (12:40)

And so yes, you'd have to cut tests off sooner. You'd probably have to use things like multi-armed bandits, advanced techniques to test lots more variants. ⁓ But in doing so, you're squeezing more value out of all that traffic that they have. And so if you can 10x your testing velocity, ⁓ that's A, not very feasible to do without the assistance of a technology like AI. But also B, it's very valuable if you can do it.

And so that's where we see this idea of continuous testing coming into play.

KK Anderson (13:16)

and that compounds over time. Yeah.

Josh (13:19)

yeah, that's the beauty

about compounding. It's like every win that you get, you know, builds on itself. And so the faster you compound, the more value your business is going to be receiving. And that's why a lot of our customers have been able to see like really big benefits very quickly with us.

KK Anderson (13:25)

Mm-hmm.

Well, and last question before we move on to the OpenAI partnership, which we're excited to learn about. So how hard is it to go from your periodic optimization or shall we say once a year optimization for some companies to this? Is it a big lift to switch? Do you have to change your whole website? What does that even entail?

Josh (13:58)

Yeah, it depends on how you're doing it. ⁓ I mean, I could speak to the co-frame piece of this, obviously. And for us, we come in and we're operational on day one with the companies that we work with. So it's no lift, basically, except for approving variations. The approval workflow still exists. And you have to make sure every variation and every experiment is given a sign off by the relevant stakeholders. for listeners at home, thinking about their own websites and how we can incorporate continuous optimization.

⁓ There ⁓ are tools out there that support this, testing tools. I think about tools like Optimizely or Adobe Target for the enterprise segment or VWO for the mid-market or lower market segments. ⁓ These are tools that we sometimes, at CoFrame, sit on top of ⁓ and we're the ones creating those tests. Really the important thing to keep in mind here is to enable continuous optimization.

It's a hungry engine. It's a very powerful engine, but it's very hungry. It requires a lot of shoveling coal in. In this case, the coal are variations. ⁓ So you have to make a lot of variations, and then those have to be based on what you're learning from the tests. And so the way that you can do this at home is by incorporating these models into how you're testing. So you're using Claude or using OpenAI, know, Chachiputti to create the variations, whether they be copy or.

or code or even images sometimes and things like that. It's not easy ⁓ to set all this up, but once you do, it's very beneficial.

KK Anderson (15:38)

Really cool. So let's go into, sorry, Mark, you go ahead. No, no. Okay. Yeah. I'm anxious to get into the OpenAI partnership. Okay. So you recently partnered with OpenAI. Congratulations. That's exciting. And you're developing what you call a first of its kind UI code, code generation. So break that down for us and tell us what this breakthrough actually means for business leaders.

Mark Petruzzi (15:39)

That sucks.

No, no kick us off. Bring us to topic topic two.

Josh (15:44)

I

Yeah, let's jump in.

Thank you.

Right, so one of the big challenges with models today is that they are very good at coding, but they're not as good at kind of like visually grounded coding. What I mean by that is when you look at a user interface, having the eye of a designer to figure out how is this code going to actually look when it's put into a user interface, especially when it comes to a pre-existing brand. So we're all operating in the world of

existing websites with existing assets and styles, and you have to stay on style and on brand and adhere to those guidelines. And a big shortcoming of today's models has been ⁓ how do we make sure that the code that we're writing when we create these variations from a layout or a user experience perspective are in adherence with these guidelines. So that was the technical challenge. ⁓ The way that we approached solving it

was we created a large data set of a bunch of different websites out there. And we trained a model to be specifically good at creating new sections of websites that were aligned with the existing brand of the existing websites. And so ⁓ our initial approach was to basically remove one of the sections and then create a text

prompt that describes what that section was in as much detail as possible, ⁓ and then use a model to create a new section that was based on that prompt. So you're basically masking out one section of the site, saying to a model, hey, look at this existing site with everything except for that section, and then create me that new section that I'm describing verbally to you. And then that's the task, and it actually creates that new section, and it's basically graded.

on how well it adheres to what the original section actually looked like. So that's the task that we use to train it. It's very similar to actually how transformers are trained in predicting the next token. But a little bit more of advanced predicting the next section instead of maybe the next token. And so that was the way that we set up the problem.

Mark Petruzzi (18:15)

Mm.

Josh (18:30)

And we were able to achieve state-of-the-art results with visually grounded cogeneration with this. And so what that means for businesses is that now, at least ones that work with CoFrame, but others maybe that would use a similar approach to train their own UI cogeneration models, ⁓ now you can have a model that really knows your brand, your visual identity, and can then create new experiences, new sections, new pages entirely, potentially. ⁓

based on what it knows about your brand. It's almost like having a designer and a front-end engineer paired up, but they've been on your team for 10 years and they know your brand really, really well.

KK Anderson (19:10)

That's really cool.

Mark Petruzzi (19:12)

So that's very cool. Josh, tell us, I guess the biggest thing that's jumping out on me is a little more of the playbook here. How did you convince OpenAI to work with you on the fine tuning of this GPT-4.0 vision? Knowing how fast they're growing, how distracted they are as an organization. So tell us a little bit about how you made that all work.

a little bit of the why. Like why are they so excited with your vision of brand consistent UI generation versus other things that may be popping around out there in the marketplace.

Josh (19:53)

Yeah, I think it comes down to just it being a really interesting problem. So in one that is interesting from a couple of different angles, one is of course the technical challenge. You know, this is a new domain ⁓ relatively, you know, like visual plus code. And so that's a really interesting combination of those two. But then there's also, it's interesting from a business standpoint, right? Like being able to create visually grounded user interfaces. That's like a really great.

⁓ thing to do. It's really core piece of this movement now, which we're seeing in like, you know, consumer products and even enterprise products that are creating, you know, code for new experiences. I think companies like Lovable and Replit and Bolt, like the ones that are just taking off right now, then ⁓ Claude and ⁓ Claude code and cursor, and there's a bunch of others too. And so

I think that that's why they were all so interested in this is because it's kind of a key piece of that equation, the front end or the user experience piece of this. How we ended up working with them is another story. had actually, I've been friends with several folks at OpenAI for a long time. ⁓ to school with a bunch of them who had joined early on and

I was at the time, I probably should have gone and done an internship there as well. I was off doing my own things usually, but it would have been probably pretty fun to be part of that early team. Anyway, I've been catching up with a bunch of them. And we were actually in the process of creating our own foundation model for UI cogeneration, right? Because this is pretty unique problem. And what we'd started to see was that ⁓

Visual ⁓ Vision Language models or VLMs were actually showing a lot of really strong promise in the open source world, ⁓ separate from the closed source models. ⁓ There was a model called Moon Dream that was out that was showing astonishingly powerful results despite it being very small. And so we were thinking, what if we made our own really strong coding LLM and then combine that with a strong vision component ⁓ using

you know, the technical term here is a clip model. And so that's that was like our initial thinking, which was if these closed source model companies like OpenAI are not going to release something that's really powerful here, ⁓ then why don't we do it ourselves? ⁓ The mistake there was, of course, thinking that they wouldn't release something as powerful. And so when I was catching up with with some of my friends there, ⁓

KK Anderson (22:39)

Yeah.

Josh (22:45)

I was mentioning this and they were like, hey, we're going to be doing something. And the moment I heard that, was like, okay, it's over. All this effort that we're putting in is going to be wasted. ⁓ You should not try to compete with these companies on that turf. ⁓ Luckily, they were, I think, impressed about how we were approaching it and asked to partner ⁓ on this. We had the data, they had the model and the team, and we kind of combined forces and did a really big sprint together for...

Mark Petruzzi (22:54)

All right.

Josh (23:14)

several weeks and got something out in time for the announcement. And then we announced it together.

KK Anderson (23:27)

That is really cool. Go ahead Mark.

Mark Petruzzi (23:31)

So, I think you have the next question, if you'd like.

KK Anderson (23:32)

So.

Okay. So now, so talk to me about kind of your go-to-market as it relates to, know, thinking about how you're going to go to market with this product. And obviously OpenAI Partnership gives you a competitive advantage. Like, you know, how defensible is it? You know, as other companies try to replicate this approach. you, do you have any competitors?

Josh (24:02)

Yeah, great question. The go-to-market approach has really been interesting because there's actually a number of different channels that we've been able to tap into. ⁓ And I know, Mark, you're actually an expert advisor at BCG, right? So you probably have seen a lot ⁓ of companies, a lot of SaaS companies approach BCG and say, hey, we'd like to work with you. BCG is actually a company that we're starting to work with as well. And that's been really beneficial.

Bain as well, we've done a little bit with. so partnerships through consulting firms have been interesting, especially on the enterprise level and looking at ways that we can bring value to these consulting firms, which are usually a little bit more, I would say hands off and sort of like advisory. But showing value quickly and getting outcomes quickly is something that is really beneficial for their model. And so that's how we've been able to partner with large consulting firms.

partnering with agencies as well, where maybe they don't have a conversion optimization practice. Maybe they're more in the paid media space or what have you, or SEO. And we can basically provide this as an added service to their offerings. ⁓ But most commonly, we're just going direct, right? We're finding people through conferences, word of mouth, customers will share and give references and stuff. ⁓ We'll have...

LinkedIn, know, campaign, not campaigns, but just like announcements of things and people will come in that way. ⁓ It's been, it's been a lot of just kind of like, you know, the momentum, keeping the momentum going and the energy in the space. think a lot of people are indeed excited about the AIs, you know, spin on it. And, the partnership with the OpenAI has actually been really helpful on the go-to-market front in terms of just like, guess, you know, credibility and they have that halo effect. so.

That's been awesome. wasn't our intention at all. It was really just let's build something cool with these folks, but ⁓ it's definitely been beneficial.

Mark Petruzzi (26:09)

that's cool, Josh. Yeah. And I've done some work with Vane over the years as well. And you're in the hands of great companies there. And it so fits into what their mission is versus what you all are doing at CoFrame as well. So let's talk about the technical challenges to orchestrating all this. What have you had to overcome in making AI generate on-brand visually consistent interfaces?

Josh (26:25)

Mm-hmm.

Mark Petruzzi (26:39)

mean, that's the key right there.

Josh (26:42)

Yeah, mean, that in itself is a technical challenge. I the models are, I have found, ⁓ they're very strong in writing code and kind of doing the quote unquote heads down work. They're actually less strong in the visual creativity side of it. They have less of a strong sense of sight than they have a sense of, I guess, logic, if you want to call it that. ⁓

That has posed a challenge, right? You know, our world is a lot about taste. It's a lot about making sure something fits in with the rest of the brand. ⁓ Conversion optimization is not simply, does this random experiment do better or not? It's about making sure that every experiment that we run is going to not only, you know, meet, but exceed the expectations of the people reviewing them on the customer side that we work with and making sure that they're actually impressed with the result before we even run the experiment.

And so that's a part of, you know, selling ourselves as Co-Frame actually. We'll go into sales calls and we will, before even working with someone, we'll show them some variations of their website. ⁓ That's kind of the beauty of the technology is that you're able to do that. Something that would otherwise take weeks of several people's time. ⁓ It's so easy for us that we can show them in a, just a qualifying call, which is kind of nice. ⁓ It's very helpful for sales.

But in order for models to be good at that, they have to be good at visuals. And most times, models off the shelves are just not good at seeing something and understanding how this is going to fit in naturally and natively with their brand. And so that was the core technical challenge here. Another challenge here ⁓ was gathering the data that was required for this. so luckily, ⁓ we were able to scrape the internet.

publicly available websites, ⁓ we basically, that's the nice part about this problem, which is that everything is basically out there for everyone to see. There's no concern ⁓ around data issues and stuff like that. But the challenge there was making a data set that actually reflected the problem that we're trying to solve, which was how do we get a model to more accurately create a new section of the site that is

aligned with the rest of website. So that was not an easy challenge to solve either. ⁓ but you luckily, when when the infrastructure is in place, you can kind of scale it up as much as you want to. And that becomes really, really powerful.

KK Anderson (29:26)

So.

Mark Petruzzi (29:26)

Great, all right, let's move, well,

we wanna move on to topic three, but I have, I keep kind of diving into one item that maybe we can do a quick sidebar in, at least in my own brain. So tell us a little more about what type of competitive advantage this creates, you know, and then how defensible is this for the companies, for your clients that jump in with you in this?

KK Anderson (29:47)

Yeah.

Josh (29:52)

Yeah, those are both great questions. we actually look at competitive advantage and defensibility a little bit in reverse. It's not what's competitive, what's like a defensible competitive advantage for a co-frame, but rather how are we creating that for our customers?

Mark Petruzzi (30:09)

Yes, and that's exactly where my question is focused on. Like how do you do that with your, how do you help your clients achieve that?

Josh (30:16)

Exactly. so that's the key piece. And I think flipping on that on its head creates this insane amount of alignment between us and our customers. ⁓ But basically with each customer, what we're doing is we're building essentially a very embedded, intelligent team member or team overall ⁓ that is working for them 24 seven. It's a team of, know, front end engineers and designers and PMs and marketers.

That's what CoFrame basically is. That is, over time as we're running more and more tests, we're learning more and more about what works for their business. And for the most part, what we've seen is, you know, what you learn about a specific business is pretty bespoke to that business. That's not the only reason why we completely silo the business data and so on. We do that also because it's just the right thing to do. you know, businesses would be concerned if we weren't doing that. But...

We certainly have found that within a given business, as this quote unquote team, embedded team gets more smart, that business has an increasing competitive advantage against other businesses that aren't 24 seven continuously optimizing and learning. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's one of those advantages. That's the beauty of compounding. We talked about earlier, but the cool part about compounding is that, you know, it might start slow, but then suddenly you have a runaway advantage. There's no way to catch up. And so.

That's what we are basically providing for our customers.

Mark Petruzzi (31:49)

Excellent, KK, will you bring us over to topic three?

KK Anderson (31:50)

Absolutely.

Yep. So let's talk about autonomous growth ⁓ and how AI agents are replacing manual optimization. And so you said that you've demonstrated 352 % improvement in click through rates with enterprise clients, which is incredible. ⁓ How should growth teams think about integrating

AI agents into their existing marketing stack.

Josh (32:21)

that's a fantastic

question. And that actually comes down to your own business. I actually have ⁓ a lot of thoughts here. marketing agents, agents in general, it's a very general topic, right? And so it's important to of like approach that from the right mindset and not just say like, here's, I'm not going to be prescriptive here because ultimately every business is different. Every workflow is different. First thing to kind of note is that

We are approaching this new world where basically ⁓ you have to make sure it impacts the bottom line. That's really, really important. ⁓ You have to make sure that it gives you an edge in whatever you're implementing agent technology into. And there is starting to become this organizational mandate as a result. The CEO of Shopify, Tobi Ludke, he recently put out a memo in which he was saying, before asking for resources, people have to demonstrate

why they can't do what they're trying to do ⁓ using AI. And so it's starting to become a mandate. So it's good that you're asking this question. The tactics that I have for evaluating whether or not to incorporate an agent into your workflow, how and when to use agents, ⁓ the first thing is to take a systems thinking mindset ⁓ to the workflow you're trying to automate here. ⁓ This is a little bit fuzzy, but

or fluffy, should say. you know, systems thinking is actually really, it's a really relevant thing to have. kind of, it's like, to me, it's this combination of AI ⁓ knowledge and knowing what the capabilities of these models are and these agents are. And then your domain knowledge, which in this case is marketing knowledge. And then finally, a general growth mindset. I know that's a fluffy term, but like having kind of that impetus to think about new ways of applying this stuff.

And so the systems thinking that comes into this is the combination of those three things. More tactically for marketing, there are several areas where this is applicable. Paid media is a big one. Looking at how ads can be, you can create different variations of ads and then optimize them over time. And there are companies that are doing this and providing ⁓ tooling for this. Coframe is going to be doing this at some point soon. ⁓ There's companies like Icon and ⁓

There's a bunch of them. Google and Meta are going to be doing themselves. There's conversion optimization for a website. That's of course what Coframe is doing. There's lifecycle marketing, emails, email campaign optimization. There's SEO, there's content operations, a bunch of stuff. The next tactic I have here is getting to know the capabilities of your AI colleagues. Trying to figure out where do we use certain models in what situations? For instance,

Claude is really great at general coding. So is now the 03 in the sort of like GPT series from OpenAI. Gemini from Google is great at long context. And so you can put a bunch of different collateral into it and have it analyze it. So my call to action for the listeners here would be get to know the different models out there and try to figure out

where are their limitations, where are their strengths. This is going to be evolving over time. So this is going to be really important to stay on top of. The next tactic I would have here is to prototype and see what's possible. You want to try to get your hands dirty and figure out what's going to show promise. ⁓ then just basically what you learn from prototyping, you should be able to have a sense for, OK, how do we apply this to my workflow and the agents that I'm trying to build?

At that point, it's really important to make sure that you're building things with what are called evals, making sure things are, you ⁓ you're actually measuring quantitatively the outcomes that you want your agent to be able to deliver. ⁓ And at the point where you do that, you know, you're in a really good place. You have a closed loop and you're ⁓ able to, with some level of reliability, automate a workflow, which is an amazing thing. And that's, think, like I was saying earlier,

the most promising part of the new AI world we're entering into.

Mark Petruzzi (36:48)

Excellent. All right, let's move us to the final topic here, and that's the future of marketing technology and growth engineering and how does this all come together for us? And the biggest question is, and this is gonna seem like I'm asking you to predict something that's 50 years in the future, because in this space, looking ahead even just 18 or 24 months is so difficult and the changes are happening daily, minute,

minute by minute. But let's say we look at 18, 24 months, how do you see the convergence of AI and growth marketing evolving? And what should marketing leaders be one, for, and secondly, driving within their companies to allow that information and those new capabilities to be executed on as quickly as possible for them?

Josh (37:42)

That's a fantastic area. You know, it's a, it's a really great question. I have this, this article, um, which I think would be a good one to check out. If you're looking to dig deeper into this topic for the listeners at home, it's on this newsletter called every by Dan shipper. Uh, it's called the new science of growth marketing. And in it, what I try to talk through is this correlation between growth marketing and finance. Interestingly enough.

So in finance, what we saw was previously, before the advent of computers and so on, people traded manually, traded stocks, bonds, other assets. And it was a very manual, very tedious process. It still is manual to an extent. People are certainly doing discretionary trading on their own. But what transformed finance in the 1980s and 90s and 2000s

⁓ was the emergence of quant finance. So quant trading and using quantitative methods, computers, ⁓ to do algorithmic trading of these assets. And what made that possible for finance was that the problem that you're trying to solve, it wasn't a simple problem, but it had a simpler output. It was either, you know, predict a price or

Mark Petruzzi (38:46)

Yeah.

Josh (39:10)

even simply a buy or sell indicator of a stock. Now the output for marketing is not something as simple as a price or a buy or sell. It is copy, is code, it is assets. ⁓ And until recently, that wasn't really possible to do with the models that we had at our disposal. But with the advent of generative AI, that is the native modality that AI is operating in.

And so what we're starting to see, and we will, I think, increasingly see, at least what I say in the article, is that just as quant finance ⁓ revolutionized the financial industry, we are going to start to see this idea of quant experimentation and quant quantitative growth methods revolutionize growth and marketing, where you'll have these strategies that are autonomous to an extent, ⁓ executed by machines.

being able to work 24 seven on your behalf and test things autonomously and make changes and personalize at a way deeper level than that was previously possible. And that's a really powerful thing because, know, to date it's been extremely tedious and time consuming to run these experiments. You require, you know, like an engineer and a designer and marketer and so on, just to get a single AB test out the door, can take weeks. What if it take minutes or hours?

you know, or less, you know, so ⁓ we're starting to enter a world where continuous optimization is then possible, all the new superhuman capabilities that we talked about earlier. ⁓ And that is what I like to think of as quant growth or quant experimentation. And I go into a bit more detail into specific strategies ⁓ in the article, very high level strategies, know, nothing super profound, but ⁓ I think it's gonna be very, very

impactful for the growth industry and for companies that use it.

KK Anderson (41:14)

So last question before we move on to our rapid fire ⁓ section. So what's going to be the highest value work for humans? Right?

Josh (41:27)

Yeah, so it's a great question.

the answer to this one, at least I kind of just borrow from this similarly borrow from what we've seen in the quant industry, right? Where instead of actually performing the trades, humans are responsible for coming up with the strategies, you know, ⁓ we have now more professionals in the financial industry than we ever have. ⁓

KK Anderson (41:46)

Okay.

Josh (41:53)

despite a lot of those manual tasks being taken by machines. ⁓ Similarly with the invention of the steam engine and electricity. ⁓ Well, the steam engine took a lot of the manual effort out of ⁓ transportation. ⁓ But we have now seen an entire new industry built up that has given a lot of jobs in performing higher level work that involves steam engines or is involved in the creation of steam engines.

There are a lot of such examples. So I think what we're going to end up seeing as applied to this industry is growth people, marketers, engineers alike, are going to have to focus less on the tedious work of writing the code, coming up with the specific assets, coming up with the specific analysis of the data and the results, and rather guiding the strategy for their businesses.

I also think we're going to see an explosion of businesses overall. We're going to, people are going to be way more empowered to be solopreneurs and, you know, small businesses and entrepreneurs and do more and offer more with less. And so we're going to start to see just like more opportunities where growth can be applied. I do think that growth teams at large, large companies might shrink because a lot of the grunt work is going to be taken on by AI. But ⁓

KK Anderson (43:00)

Yeah.

Josh (43:20)

there's going to be a lot more opportunity for many, many more types of businesses out there to use these advanced growth tactics as well.

Mark Petruzzi (43:28)

And I just want to point out that that last question that KK presented was submitted by a bot, by a robot, because they want to know how they can leverage us now into working for them instead of the other way around. it's already happening. That was not from a human. OK, we're going to go rapid fire over the last three minutes or so here. This has been great, Josh. So thank you.

KK Anderson (43:42)

Hahaha! ⁓

Josh (43:43)

already happening. wow. That's amazing.

Mark Petruzzi (43:57)

So Josh, what was the first product or service you were ever responsible for selling?

Josh (44:05)

wow. That's a great question. It has nothing to do with my current industry, but it has all to do with who I am, which is music. I had a little jazz group back in high school and we made some albums and reinvested the proceeds back into the band and made recordings, more recordings and did little touring. So yeah, that was my first exposure to business.

KK Anderson (44:14)

That's right.

Mark Petruzzi (44:28)

So everything you touch is successful, right? Is that how it works, Justin?

Josh (44:31)

Definitely not, but

I appreciate that.

KK Anderson (44:37)

Okay,

who's your favorite CEO to follow?

Josh (44:41)

man,

that's a, it's a great question. I'd have to say Eric Schmidt, ⁓ he's like next level, maybe the best operator in the whole world, ⁓ just insane story. And, ⁓ I've had the opportunity to learn some things from him directly and work with him through a couple of different things. And so, but I think he's awesome.

Mark Petruzzi (45:02)

Very cool. Okay, a tool other than CoFrame that every growth leader should be using.

Josh (45:11)

man. Well, I think it's really, really important to have a really solid sense of your data for sure. So some type of, some type of analytics platform, Amplitude's a really great one. know, Adobe analytics, ⁓ post-hoc, et cetera. I think that, you know, the more you have a sense of what's happening in your business, the more you're going to be able to improve it and measure, measure those outcomes.

KK Anderson (45:39)

Question, do you have to have one of those to be able to use CoFrame?

Josh (45:42)

No, no, we actually come with full data, you know, analytics included, but we do plug into these, these systems.

KK Anderson (45:49)

Okay, now for my favorite question. Advice that you would give your 21 year old self.

Josh (45:55)

that's a good

one. man. ⁓ Okay. So I think that what I would probably say is like, like basically hype is not the same as substance. You know, I've, I've, I've seen a lot of, a lot of hype in my career so far. ⁓ And, you know, easy come easy go. Like things will just like, there'll be bubbles, they'll collapse and there'll be things that

that what you want to be doing is basically subtracting the noise to try to find the true signal and keep this level of groundedness to try to figure out what is truly valuable here and think from first principles what is going to be durable and sustain over time. And so I'd really urge myself, I guess, to really focus on the substance.

Mark Petruzzi (46:45)

Oh, I love that, Josh. And as a, know, as a reoccurring, you know, individual who's launched different companies, been CEO of multiple companies at this point, I love to have you, I love to hear you thinking about that in those terms. Because, you know, I have a lot of friends who have done the same from, you know, different company to the next and...

they start doing it a few times at the CEO level and they start to think that's their job is to always drive that hype through the market. And even sometimes within their own organization, they think they need to have credibly positive energy in their business at all times. And that's not life as we know it. And ⁓ having that realistic approach is really impressive.

Josh, thank you so much for taking the time with us. This was great and we're excited as we go along to learn more about Code Frame and see how we can leverage that into some of the work we do with clients.

Josh (47:54)

It's been a pleasure, Mark. Thanks so much for having me, Mark and KK. Really good to see you both.

KK Anderson (47:54)

Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you, Josh.

Mark Petruzzi (48:01)

Perfect, all right. Thanks, all. Thanks, Josh. Thanks, KK. Cheers.

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 the Cloud, Josh Payne—Founder & CEO of CoFrame and creator of GPT-Migrate—joins Mark Petruzzi and KK Anderson to explore how AI agents and continuously optimizing websites are changing the future of digital growth.

Josh shares how CoFrame is helping mid-market and enterprise companies drive 30%+ increases in conversion by building adaptive, AI-powered interfaces that test, learn, and optimize in real time. He also unpacks how his team partnered with OpenAI to create a state-of-the-art UI code generation model—and what this signals about the future of growth marketing.

Whether you’re a CMO, growth lead, or founder looking to build durable competitive advantage through AI, this episode will shift your mindset and your roadmap.

What You’ll Learn:

• From Static to Living Interfaces: Why websites are broken—and how AI agents can continuously optimize them based on real-time data and buyer behavior.
• The End of Manual A/B Testing: How Josh’s team automates experimentation at scale to unlock compound conversion lifts without traditional resource bottlenecks.
• Inside the OpenAI Partnership: How CoFrame trained a UI-specific code generation model that understands brand, layout, and style—then deployed it at scale.
• Building Competitive Advantage with AI: Why businesses that embrace continuous optimization today will outpace those stuck in manual, quarterly workflows.
• Designing the Future Growth Stack: How AI agents, data orchestration, and strategy automation will transform marketing roles and unlock new GTM velocity.

Key Topics:

• Living interfaces vs. static websites
• AI code generation for brand-consistent design
• Scaling experimentation with AI agents
• The future of CRO: conversion rate optimization
• AI in paid media, lifecycle marketing, and SEO
• Strategy design vs. manual execution
• How to evaluate AI models like Claude, Gemini, GPT-4
• Building “quant growth” systems for marketing
• Why the next big AI use case is growth engineering

Guest Spotlight: Josh Payne

Josh is the CEO of CoFrame and a repeat founder with deep roots in AI. He previously co-founded Autograph (a $2B+ unicorn), created GPT-Migrate, and authored over 20 patents and AI research papers. At CoFrame, he’s pioneering AI-first digital experiences that adapt to users in real time.

Resources & Mentions:

• CoFrame: https://coframe.com
• Article: The New Science of Growth Marketing – Every
• Tech: GPT-4 Vision, Claude, MoonDream, OpenAI fine-tuning
• Tools Mentioned: Optimizely, Adobe Target, VWO, Amplitude
• Topic: Quant growth, UI code generation, AI agents

🎧 Listen now and follow Selling the Cloud for cutting-edge conversations with the builders, strategists, and GTM leaders shaping the future of sales, growth, and AI.

Mark Petruzzi (00:02)

Welcome to today's episode of Selling the Cloud podcast. We are excited to welcome Josh Payne, founder and CEO of CoFrame. Josh is a serial entrepreneur and AI pioneer who has co-founded multiple successful companies, including Autograph, a 2 billion plus unicorn backed by A16Z and Access Bell, which has been acquired by Tata.

He's also the creator of GPT Migrate, one of the first popular coding agents and has authored over 20 papers and patents in AI. At CoFrame, Josh is building the future of digital interfaces, websites and apps that continuously optimize themselves using AI. The company recently raised 9.3 million from Coastal Ventures.

and partnered with OpenAI to develop breakthrough UI code generation technology that's driving a 30 % plus improvement in conversion rates for mid-market and enterprise clients alike. Today, Josh will share how AI agents are revolutionizing growth marketing and website optimization, what it means to build living interfaces, and how go-to-market teams should prepare for the autonomous

optimization era that we are in today. So welcome, Josh, welcome.

Josh (01:31)

Thanks so much for having me, Mark. Good to see you.

Mark Petruzzi (01:33)

Excellent. Thank you. Okay, four themes we'll focus on today. From static to living, the AI powered interface revolution, the OpenAI partnership building visually grounded AI at scale, autonomous growth, how AI agents are replacing manual optimization, and the future of marketing technology and growth engineering. So first area here, Josh, for us to jump into.

You describe CoFrame as creating living interfaces rather than static websites. What's fundamentally broken about how we think about digital experiences today?

Josh (02:15)

Yeah, so the problem with digital experiences as we know them, it comes on both sides. There's the problem from the business side, which is that it takes a lot of effort to make these digital experiences like websites or apps better for our customers. And people tend to spend a lot of money and time doing so. On the customer side, it's also an issue because you have these experiences that are one size fits all. They're not adaptive. They're not personal, you know?

They lack the context of you as a person. And the way that we're approaching this is the problem is, let's think about this from the ground up. If you could redesign the concept of digital interfaces today in a world where AI is possible and as powerful as it is, you know, look at the trend of where things are going in terms of the capabilities that it has. How would you design these customer experiences?

And that was really our impetus, which was, let's think about a world in which these digital interfaces were living in a sense, they could be adaptive and personal from the ground up. And so what we're doing essentially is, is enabling that capability for the businesses that we work with and their customer experiences, allowing their, their teams to not have to do all that grunt work and trying to continuously stay on top of.

⁓ of making those customer experiences better at great cost and ⁓ great time.

KK Anderson (03:51)

Like, what would a use case be or an example, just to go a little deeper into living interfaces? I think it sounds amazing.

Josh (03:59)

Absolutely. The biggest one that we focus on at the moment is website optimization. So you're probably very familiar with the idea of websites being a conduit for which consumers can interact and transact. And the problem with websites today is that, like I was mentioning, it takes a lot of effort to improve the conversion rate ⁓ of these sites. 95 % of

plus of traffic on the internet doesn't convert, right? It's people who go to a website and they check it out and they decided that maybe it's not a fit for them or they don't get the punchline, they don't get the idea. And this is truer in other industries than it is, know, for instance, in e-commerce, this is a huge, huge problem because the website is everything, right? And, you know, consumer finance tends to be a big one as well. And so,

What you end up seeing is ⁓ these teams spending a lot of time running experiments on these websites. You'll have a product manager or a marketer come up with a concept or an idea of what to test. They'll pass that on to a designer. They'll come up with designs and concepts. They'll then go and pass that on to an engineering team, which will go and implement the idea to be tested in the website. And that handoff process, that whole process takes weeks, sometimes months.

to do. And just an insane amount of time, when you look at the dollar value of time, an insane amount of cost and headcount. ⁓ And so it's a very broken process. It's still very beneficial and valuable, because every win that you get, every better version of that experience, tends to give you significantly more revenue, because you're stacking those conversions over time. You start to see the compounding benefits.

It's really, really painful. so the use case here that we're very focused on at CoFrame, at least, is bringing this idea of adaptive, personalized websites where different people can have different experiences that are suited to them to really help to increase that end KPI that the business cares about, usually a conversion KPI.

Mark Petruzzi (06:20)

So Josh, you have built multiple successful companies in different paradigms. What made you pivot from traditional SaaS to this AI-first approach with CoFrame?

Josh (06:35)

Yeah, I mean, this is a big question a lot of operators are facing right now, which is, how is the role of software going to evolve in this world of AI? I think we're seeing the commoditization of software. starting to see, on the flip side, we're seeing a lot of incredible new capabilities that AI is enabling. I actually think that one of the biggest opportunities right now in the space overall, in the world, is

taking processes that are manual and take a lot of work and then applying ⁓ sort of an AI first mindset to that to figure out how can we automate or optimize different parts of that process and then deliver that outcome with way less effort involved. So an example here of what we're doing, know, conversion optimization, like I was saying, that kind of takes, you know, design and engineering and product management and a bunch of different manual functions that are tedious. And so

Our approach was, can we break down that whole long process that is delivering the outcome, which is basically experiments for your website and use AI to significantly accelerate and then automate that ⁓ end to end. Now there's still human involvement for sure. And there's, there's like a gradient of, of involvement, right? But on the level of completely manual to completely automated, we're gradually moving toward that automation piece. And I think that that's.

really the biggest opportunity currently in the world of AI is looking at what is currently manual and trying to figure out systematically how can we automate that and ⁓ make it not as painful ultimately.

KK Anderson (08:17)

So really interesting. where in your professional opinion do most companies go wrong when they're trying to optimize their websites and their digital experiences? And I heard what you said earlier. And by the way, once four to eight weeks have passed and the new website is launched, that content is stale. there you are going back at it again.

Talk to me about where they go wrong and how you recommend that they shift.

Josh (08:53)

Yeah, so

I mean, a big thing that I see a lot is people are just not testing enough. know, there's that when you look at the math behind conversion optimization and experimentation, it's pretty astounding. you know, if you like, think about ⁓ a series of tests that you run, you find a couple of wins within those tests. It's not like those wins are going to give you, you know, a boost of revenue for that month and then you're done. No, that win stays with you for good, for the most part.

And they also compound over time. So if you find a 2 % conversion left here, a very small left here, you know, and then a 5 % over here, and then a 3 % over there, you suddenly have 10 % in aggregate conversion left. That could be 10 % more revenue, you know, over the course of forever. Right. And so that comp, that's why compounding is so powerful here, because you start to be able to see, you know, this like, this, this, this super linear growth.

⁓ of your business value.

Mark Petruzzi (09:56)

Yeah, what I love about that, Josh, is you're kind of taking us to continuous, instead of periodic testing. it's just, and that's the beauty of AI and it's the beauty of the intelligence that it's building in some of these large language models that, like you said, it compounds, they get better, they get smarter, and that's phenomenal. And, you know, I guess we're putting the A-B test out of

Josh (10:05)

Yes, exactly.

Mark Petruzzi (10:26)

at a commission at this point, because unless you want to look at it as A-B testing 24-7. yeah, so ⁓ what's the first thing a growth leader should understand about moving from this periodic optimization to this continuous AI-driven improvement?

Josh (10:32)

Yeah, A to Z testing.

KK Anderson (10:35)

Yeah.

Josh (10:46)

Yeah, so first thing is just like a mindset shift, right? A-B testing is valuable and it has its place. And you can still compound those wins over time with A-B testing. ⁓ We are now living in a world where the cost of creating new experiments is very low. So what I like to usually think through ⁓ when it comes to opportunities in the AI space is we talked a lot about automation, right?

like taking something that is manual and autumny. I think that's the biggest opportunity currently. ⁓ Now, there's another piece of this, which I think is also very valuable, we think of that a lot, which is what wasn't possible before that is now possible. So net new superhuman capabilities. So first is taking a human capability and then just performing that. And then the second bucket is

taking something that just wasn't possible before or feasible or reasonable to do and doing that. And so continuous optimization actually falls in that second bucket. The first bucket being here's how people are optimizing today with A-B testing. And we're just going to automate that. The second bucket is what new types of tests are now possible with AI. And I'll give you a simple example of this. ⁓

KK Anderson (11:54)

The superhuman?

Josh (12:11)

⁓ Let's see, Booking.com is actually probably one of the closest to this. They're a really, really advanced company when it comes to growth and optimization. They're running a thousand plus experiments at any given time. ⁓ But with their level of traffic, they could be running probably tens of thousands of experiments at any given time. ⁓ That's just not feasible to do ⁓ with ⁓ purely with human labor, right? It would just not make sense from an economic standpoint of time spent.

KK Anderson (12:34)

humans.

Josh (12:40)

And so yes, you'd have to cut tests off sooner. You'd probably have to use things like multi-armed bandits, advanced techniques to test lots more variants. ⁓ But in doing so, you're squeezing more value out of all that traffic that they have. And so if you can 10x your testing velocity, ⁓ that's A, not very feasible to do without the assistance of a technology like AI. But also B, it's very valuable if you can do it.

And so that's where we see this idea of continuous testing coming into play.

KK Anderson (13:16)

and that compounds over time. Yeah.

Josh (13:19)

yeah, that's the beauty

about compounding. It's like every win that you get, you know, builds on itself. And so the faster you compound, the more value your business is going to be receiving. And that's why a lot of our customers have been able to see like really big benefits very quickly with us.

KK Anderson (13:25)

Mm-hmm.

Well, and last question before we move on to the OpenAI partnership, which we're excited to learn about. So how hard is it to go from your periodic optimization or shall we say once a year optimization for some companies to this? Is it a big lift to switch? Do you have to change your whole website? What does that even entail?

Josh (13:58)

Yeah, it depends on how you're doing it. ⁓ I mean, I could speak to the co-frame piece of this, obviously. And for us, we come in and we're operational on day one with the companies that we work with. So it's no lift, basically, except for approving variations. The approval workflow still exists. And you have to make sure every variation and every experiment is given a sign off by the relevant stakeholders. for listeners at home, thinking about their own websites and how we can incorporate continuous optimization.

⁓ There ⁓ are tools out there that support this, testing tools. I think about tools like Optimizely or Adobe Target for the enterprise segment or VWO for the mid-market or lower market segments. ⁓ These are tools that we sometimes, at CoFrame, sit on top of ⁓ and we're the ones creating those tests. Really the important thing to keep in mind here is to enable continuous optimization.

It's a hungry engine. It's a very powerful engine, but it's very hungry. It requires a lot of shoveling coal in. In this case, the coal are variations. ⁓ So you have to make a lot of variations, and then those have to be based on what you're learning from the tests. And so the way that you can do this at home is by incorporating these models into how you're testing. So you're using Claude or using OpenAI, know, Chachiputti to create the variations, whether they be copy or.

or code or even images sometimes and things like that. It's not easy ⁓ to set all this up, but once you do, it's very beneficial.

KK Anderson (15:38)

Really cool. So let's go into, sorry, Mark, you go ahead. No, no. Okay. Yeah. I'm anxious to get into the OpenAI partnership. Okay. So you recently partnered with OpenAI. Congratulations. That's exciting. And you're developing what you call a first of its kind UI code, code generation. So break that down for us and tell us what this breakthrough actually means for business leaders.

Mark Petruzzi (15:39)

That sucks.

No, no kick us off. Bring us to topic topic two.

Josh (15:44)

I

Yeah, let's jump in.

Thank you.

Right, so one of the big challenges with models today is that they are very good at coding, but they're not as good at kind of like visually grounded coding. What I mean by that is when you look at a user interface, having the eye of a designer to figure out how is this code going to actually look when it's put into a user interface, especially when it comes to a pre-existing brand. So we're all operating in the world of

existing websites with existing assets and styles, and you have to stay on style and on brand and adhere to those guidelines. And a big shortcoming of today's models has been ⁓ how do we make sure that the code that we're writing when we create these variations from a layout or a user experience perspective are in adherence with these guidelines. So that was the technical challenge. ⁓ The way that we approached solving it

was we created a large data set of a bunch of different websites out there. And we trained a model to be specifically good at creating new sections of websites that were aligned with the existing brand of the existing websites. And so ⁓ our initial approach was to basically remove one of the sections and then create a text

prompt that describes what that section was in as much detail as possible, ⁓ and then use a model to create a new section that was based on that prompt. So you're basically masking out one section of the site, saying to a model, hey, look at this existing site with everything except for that section, and then create me that new section that I'm describing verbally to you. And then that's the task, and it actually creates that new section, and it's basically graded.

on how well it adheres to what the original section actually looked like. So that's the task that we use to train it. It's very similar to actually how transformers are trained in predicting the next token. But a little bit more of advanced predicting the next section instead of maybe the next token. And so that was the way that we set up the problem.

Mark Petruzzi (18:15)

Mm.

Josh (18:30)

And we were able to achieve state-of-the-art results with visually grounded cogeneration with this. And so what that means for businesses is that now, at least ones that work with CoFrame, but others maybe that would use a similar approach to train their own UI cogeneration models, ⁓ now you can have a model that really knows your brand, your visual identity, and can then create new experiences, new sections, new pages entirely, potentially. ⁓

based on what it knows about your brand. It's almost like having a designer and a front-end engineer paired up, but they've been on your team for 10 years and they know your brand really, really well.

KK Anderson (19:10)

That's really cool.

Mark Petruzzi (19:12)

So that's very cool. Josh, tell us, I guess the biggest thing that's jumping out on me is a little more of the playbook here. How did you convince OpenAI to work with you on the fine tuning of this GPT-4.0 vision? Knowing how fast they're growing, how distracted they are as an organization. So tell us a little bit about how you made that all work.

a little bit of the why. Like why are they so excited with your vision of brand consistent UI generation versus other things that may be popping around out there in the marketplace.

Josh (19:53)

Yeah, I think it comes down to just it being a really interesting problem. So in one that is interesting from a couple of different angles, one is of course the technical challenge. You know, this is a new domain ⁓ relatively, you know, like visual plus code. And so that's a really interesting combination of those two. But then there's also, it's interesting from a business standpoint, right? Like being able to create visually grounded user interfaces. That's like a really great.

⁓ thing to do. It's really core piece of this movement now, which we're seeing in like, you know, consumer products and even enterprise products that are creating, you know, code for new experiences. I think companies like Lovable and Replit and Bolt, like the ones that are just taking off right now, then ⁓ Claude and ⁓ Claude code and cursor, and there's a bunch of others too. And so

I think that that's why they were all so interested in this is because it's kind of a key piece of that equation, the front end or the user experience piece of this. How we ended up working with them is another story. had actually, I've been friends with several folks at OpenAI for a long time. ⁓ to school with a bunch of them who had joined early on and

I was at the time, I probably should have gone and done an internship there as well. I was off doing my own things usually, but it would have been probably pretty fun to be part of that early team. Anyway, I've been catching up with a bunch of them. And we were actually in the process of creating our own foundation model for UI cogeneration, right? Because this is pretty unique problem. And what we'd started to see was that ⁓

Visual ⁓ Vision Language models or VLMs were actually showing a lot of really strong promise in the open source world, ⁓ separate from the closed source models. ⁓ There was a model called Moon Dream that was out that was showing astonishingly powerful results despite it being very small. And so we were thinking, what if we made our own really strong coding LLM and then combine that with a strong vision component ⁓ using

you know, the technical term here is a clip model. And so that's that was like our initial thinking, which was if these closed source model companies like OpenAI are not going to release something that's really powerful here, ⁓ then why don't we do it ourselves? ⁓ The mistake there was, of course, thinking that they wouldn't release something as powerful. And so when I was catching up with with some of my friends there, ⁓

KK Anderson (22:39)

Yeah.

Josh (22:45)

I was mentioning this and they were like, hey, we're going to be doing something. And the moment I heard that, was like, okay, it's over. All this effort that we're putting in is going to be wasted. ⁓ You should not try to compete with these companies on that turf. ⁓ Luckily, they were, I think, impressed about how we were approaching it and asked to partner ⁓ on this. We had the data, they had the model and the team, and we kind of combined forces and did a really big sprint together for...

Mark Petruzzi (22:54)

All right.

Josh (23:14)

several weeks and got something out in time for the announcement. And then we announced it together.

KK Anderson (23:27)

That is really cool. Go ahead Mark.

Mark Petruzzi (23:31)

So, I think you have the next question, if you'd like.

KK Anderson (23:32)

So.

Okay. So now, so talk to me about kind of your go-to-market as it relates to, know, thinking about how you're going to go to market with this product. And obviously OpenAI Partnership gives you a competitive advantage. Like, you know, how defensible is it? You know, as other companies try to replicate this approach. you, do you have any competitors?

Josh (24:02)

Yeah, great question. The go-to-market approach has really been interesting because there's actually a number of different channels that we've been able to tap into. ⁓ And I know, Mark, you're actually an expert advisor at BCG, right? So you probably have seen a lot ⁓ of companies, a lot of SaaS companies approach BCG and say, hey, we'd like to work with you. BCG is actually a company that we're starting to work with as well. And that's been really beneficial.

Bain as well, we've done a little bit with. so partnerships through consulting firms have been interesting, especially on the enterprise level and looking at ways that we can bring value to these consulting firms, which are usually a little bit more, I would say hands off and sort of like advisory. But showing value quickly and getting outcomes quickly is something that is really beneficial for their model. And so that's how we've been able to partner with large consulting firms.

partnering with agencies as well, where maybe they don't have a conversion optimization practice. Maybe they're more in the paid media space or what have you, or SEO. And we can basically provide this as an added service to their offerings. ⁓ But most commonly, we're just going direct, right? We're finding people through conferences, word of mouth, customers will share and give references and stuff. ⁓ We'll have...

LinkedIn, know, campaign, not campaigns, but just like announcements of things and people will come in that way. ⁓ It's been, it's been a lot of just kind of like, you know, the momentum, keeping the momentum going and the energy in the space. think a lot of people are indeed excited about the AIs, you know, spin on it. And, the partnership with the OpenAI has actually been really helpful on the go-to-market front in terms of just like, guess, you know, credibility and they have that halo effect. so.

That's been awesome. wasn't our intention at all. It was really just let's build something cool with these folks, but ⁓ it's definitely been beneficial.

Mark Petruzzi (26:09)

that's cool, Josh. Yeah. And I've done some work with Vane over the years as well. And you're in the hands of great companies there. And it so fits into what their mission is versus what you all are doing at CoFrame as well. So let's talk about the technical challenges to orchestrating all this. What have you had to overcome in making AI generate on-brand visually consistent interfaces?

Josh (26:25)

Mm-hmm.

Mark Petruzzi (26:39)

mean, that's the key right there.

Josh (26:42)

Yeah, mean, that in itself is a technical challenge. I the models are, I have found, ⁓ they're very strong in writing code and kind of doing the quote unquote heads down work. They're actually less strong in the visual creativity side of it. They have less of a strong sense of sight than they have a sense of, I guess, logic, if you want to call it that. ⁓

That has posed a challenge, right? You know, our world is a lot about taste. It's a lot about making sure something fits in with the rest of the brand. ⁓ Conversion optimization is not simply, does this random experiment do better or not? It's about making sure that every experiment that we run is going to not only, you know, meet, but exceed the expectations of the people reviewing them on the customer side that we work with and making sure that they're actually impressed with the result before we even run the experiment.

And so that's a part of, you know, selling ourselves as Co-Frame actually. We'll go into sales calls and we will, before even working with someone, we'll show them some variations of their website. ⁓ That's kind of the beauty of the technology is that you're able to do that. Something that would otherwise take weeks of several people's time. ⁓ It's so easy for us that we can show them in a, just a qualifying call, which is kind of nice. ⁓ It's very helpful for sales.

But in order for models to be good at that, they have to be good at visuals. And most times, models off the shelves are just not good at seeing something and understanding how this is going to fit in naturally and natively with their brand. And so that was the core technical challenge here. Another challenge here ⁓ was gathering the data that was required for this. so luckily, ⁓ we were able to scrape the internet.

publicly available websites, ⁓ we basically, that's the nice part about this problem, which is that everything is basically out there for everyone to see. There's no concern ⁓ around data issues and stuff like that. But the challenge there was making a data set that actually reflected the problem that we're trying to solve, which was how do we get a model to more accurately create a new section of the site that is

aligned with the rest of website. So that was not an easy challenge to solve either. ⁓ but you luckily, when when the infrastructure is in place, you can kind of scale it up as much as you want to. And that becomes really, really powerful.

KK Anderson (29:26)

So.

Mark Petruzzi (29:26)

Great, all right, let's move, well,

we wanna move on to topic three, but I have, I keep kind of diving into one item that maybe we can do a quick sidebar in, at least in my own brain. So tell us a little more about what type of competitive advantage this creates, you know, and then how defensible is this for the companies, for your clients that jump in with you in this?

KK Anderson (29:47)

Yeah.

Josh (29:52)

Yeah, those are both great questions. we actually look at competitive advantage and defensibility a little bit in reverse. It's not what's competitive, what's like a defensible competitive advantage for a co-frame, but rather how are we creating that for our customers?

Mark Petruzzi (30:09)

Yes, and that's exactly where my question is focused on. Like how do you do that with your, how do you help your clients achieve that?

Josh (30:16)

Exactly. so that's the key piece. And I think flipping on that on its head creates this insane amount of alignment between us and our customers. ⁓ But basically with each customer, what we're doing is we're building essentially a very embedded, intelligent team member or team overall ⁓ that is working for them 24 seven. It's a team of, know, front end engineers and designers and PMs and marketers.

That's what CoFrame basically is. That is, over time as we're running more and more tests, we're learning more and more about what works for their business. And for the most part, what we've seen is, you know, what you learn about a specific business is pretty bespoke to that business. That's not the only reason why we completely silo the business data and so on. We do that also because it's just the right thing to do. you know, businesses would be concerned if we weren't doing that. But...

We certainly have found that within a given business, as this quote unquote team, embedded team gets more smart, that business has an increasing competitive advantage against other businesses that aren't 24 seven continuously optimizing and learning. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's one of those advantages. That's the beauty of compounding. We talked about earlier, but the cool part about compounding is that, you know, it might start slow, but then suddenly you have a runaway advantage. There's no way to catch up. And so.

That's what we are basically providing for our customers.

Mark Petruzzi (31:49)

Excellent, KK, will you bring us over to topic three?

KK Anderson (31:50)

Absolutely.

Yep. So let's talk about autonomous growth ⁓ and how AI agents are replacing manual optimization. And so you said that you've demonstrated 352 % improvement in click through rates with enterprise clients, which is incredible. ⁓ How should growth teams think about integrating

AI agents into their existing marketing stack.

Josh (32:21)

that's a fantastic

question. And that actually comes down to your own business. I actually have ⁓ a lot of thoughts here. marketing agents, agents in general, it's a very general topic, right? And so it's important to of like approach that from the right mindset and not just say like, here's, I'm not going to be prescriptive here because ultimately every business is different. Every workflow is different. First thing to kind of note is that

We are approaching this new world where basically ⁓ you have to make sure it impacts the bottom line. That's really, really important. ⁓ You have to make sure that it gives you an edge in whatever you're implementing agent technology into. And there is starting to become this organizational mandate as a result. The CEO of Shopify, Tobi Ludke, he recently put out a memo in which he was saying, before asking for resources, people have to demonstrate

why they can't do what they're trying to do ⁓ using AI. And so it's starting to become a mandate. So it's good that you're asking this question. The tactics that I have for evaluating whether or not to incorporate an agent into your workflow, how and when to use agents, ⁓ the first thing is to take a systems thinking mindset ⁓ to the workflow you're trying to automate here. ⁓ This is a little bit fuzzy, but

or fluffy, should say. you know, systems thinking is actually really, it's a really relevant thing to have. kind of, it's like, to me, it's this combination of AI ⁓ knowledge and knowing what the capabilities of these models are and these agents are. And then your domain knowledge, which in this case is marketing knowledge. And then finally, a general growth mindset. I know that's a fluffy term, but like having kind of that impetus to think about new ways of applying this stuff.

And so the systems thinking that comes into this is the combination of those three things. More tactically for marketing, there are several areas where this is applicable. Paid media is a big one. Looking at how ads can be, you can create different variations of ads and then optimize them over time. And there are companies that are doing this and providing ⁓ tooling for this. Coframe is going to be doing this at some point soon. ⁓ There's companies like Icon and ⁓

There's a bunch of them. Google and Meta are going to be doing themselves. There's conversion optimization for a website. That's of course what Coframe is doing. There's lifecycle marketing, emails, email campaign optimization. There's SEO, there's content operations, a bunch of stuff. The next tactic I have here is getting to know the capabilities of your AI colleagues. Trying to figure out where do we use certain models in what situations? For instance,

Claude is really great at general coding. So is now the 03 in the sort of like GPT series from OpenAI. Gemini from Google is great at long context. And so you can put a bunch of different collateral into it and have it analyze it. So my call to action for the listeners here would be get to know the different models out there and try to figure out

where are their limitations, where are their strengths. This is going to be evolving over time. So this is going to be really important to stay on top of. The next tactic I would have here is to prototype and see what's possible. You want to try to get your hands dirty and figure out what's going to show promise. ⁓ then just basically what you learn from prototyping, you should be able to have a sense for, OK, how do we apply this to my workflow and the agents that I'm trying to build?

At that point, it's really important to make sure that you're building things with what are called evals, making sure things are, you ⁓ you're actually measuring quantitatively the outcomes that you want your agent to be able to deliver. ⁓ And at the point where you do that, you know, you're in a really good place. You have a closed loop and you're ⁓ able to, with some level of reliability, automate a workflow, which is an amazing thing. And that's, think, like I was saying earlier,

the most promising part of the new AI world we're entering into.

Mark Petruzzi (36:48)

Excellent. All right, let's move us to the final topic here, and that's the future of marketing technology and growth engineering and how does this all come together for us? And the biggest question is, and this is gonna seem like I'm asking you to predict something that's 50 years in the future, because in this space, looking ahead even just 18 or 24 months is so difficult and the changes are happening daily, minute,

minute by minute. But let's say we look at 18, 24 months, how do you see the convergence of AI and growth marketing evolving? And what should marketing leaders be one, for, and secondly, driving within their companies to allow that information and those new capabilities to be executed on as quickly as possible for them?

Josh (37:42)

That's a fantastic area. You know, it's a, it's a really great question. I have this, this article, um, which I think would be a good one to check out. If you're looking to dig deeper into this topic for the listeners at home, it's on this newsletter called every by Dan shipper. Uh, it's called the new science of growth marketing. And in it, what I try to talk through is this correlation between growth marketing and finance. Interestingly enough.

So in finance, what we saw was previously, before the advent of computers and so on, people traded manually, traded stocks, bonds, other assets. And it was a very manual, very tedious process. It still is manual to an extent. People are certainly doing discretionary trading on their own. But what transformed finance in the 1980s and 90s and 2000s

⁓ was the emergence of quant finance. So quant trading and using quantitative methods, computers, ⁓ to do algorithmic trading of these assets. And what made that possible for finance was that the problem that you're trying to solve, it wasn't a simple problem, but it had a simpler output. It was either, you know, predict a price or

Mark Petruzzi (38:46)

Yeah.

Josh (39:10)

even simply a buy or sell indicator of a stock. Now the output for marketing is not something as simple as a price or a buy or sell. It is copy, is code, it is assets. ⁓ And until recently, that wasn't really possible to do with the models that we had at our disposal. But with the advent of generative AI, that is the native modality that AI is operating in.

And so what we're starting to see, and we will, I think, increasingly see, at least what I say in the article, is that just as quant finance ⁓ revolutionized the financial industry, we are going to start to see this idea of quant experimentation and quant quantitative growth methods revolutionize growth and marketing, where you'll have these strategies that are autonomous to an extent, ⁓ executed by machines.

being able to work 24 seven on your behalf and test things autonomously and make changes and personalize at a way deeper level than that was previously possible. And that's a really powerful thing because, know, to date it's been extremely tedious and time consuming to run these experiments. You require, you know, like an engineer and a designer and marketer and so on, just to get a single AB test out the door, can take weeks. What if it take minutes or hours?

you know, or less, you know, so ⁓ we're starting to enter a world where continuous optimization is then possible, all the new superhuman capabilities that we talked about earlier. ⁓ And that is what I like to think of as quant growth or quant experimentation. And I go into a bit more detail into specific strategies ⁓ in the article, very high level strategies, know, nothing super profound, but ⁓ I think it's gonna be very, very

impactful for the growth industry and for companies that use it.

KK Anderson (41:14)

So last question before we move on to our rapid fire ⁓ section. So what's going to be the highest value work for humans? Right?

Josh (41:27)

Yeah, so it's a great question.

the answer to this one, at least I kind of just borrow from this similarly borrow from what we've seen in the quant industry, right? Where instead of actually performing the trades, humans are responsible for coming up with the strategies, you know, ⁓ we have now more professionals in the financial industry than we ever have. ⁓

KK Anderson (41:46)

Okay.

Josh (41:53)

despite a lot of those manual tasks being taken by machines. ⁓ Similarly with the invention of the steam engine and electricity. ⁓ Well, the steam engine took a lot of the manual effort out of ⁓ transportation. ⁓ But we have now seen an entire new industry built up that has given a lot of jobs in performing higher level work that involves steam engines or is involved in the creation of steam engines.

There are a lot of such examples. So I think what we're going to end up seeing as applied to this industry is growth people, marketers, engineers alike, are going to have to focus less on the tedious work of writing the code, coming up with the specific assets, coming up with the specific analysis of the data and the results, and rather guiding the strategy for their businesses.

I also think we're going to see an explosion of businesses overall. We're going to, people are going to be way more empowered to be solopreneurs and, you know, small businesses and entrepreneurs and do more and offer more with less. And so we're going to start to see just like more opportunities where growth can be applied. I do think that growth teams at large, large companies might shrink because a lot of the grunt work is going to be taken on by AI. But ⁓

KK Anderson (43:00)

Yeah.

Josh (43:20)

there's going to be a lot more opportunity for many, many more types of businesses out there to use these advanced growth tactics as well.

Mark Petruzzi (43:28)

And I just want to point out that that last question that KK presented was submitted by a bot, by a robot, because they want to know how they can leverage us now into working for them instead of the other way around. it's already happening. That was not from a human. OK, we're going to go rapid fire over the last three minutes or so here. This has been great, Josh. So thank you.

KK Anderson (43:42)

Hahaha! ⁓

Josh (43:43)

already happening. wow. That's amazing.

Mark Petruzzi (43:57)

So Josh, what was the first product or service you were ever responsible for selling?

Josh (44:05)

wow. That's a great question. It has nothing to do with my current industry, but it has all to do with who I am, which is music. I had a little jazz group back in high school and we made some albums and reinvested the proceeds back into the band and made recordings, more recordings and did little touring. So yeah, that was my first exposure to business.

KK Anderson (44:14)

That's right.

Mark Petruzzi (44:28)

So everything you touch is successful, right? Is that how it works, Justin?

Josh (44:31)

Definitely not, but

I appreciate that.

KK Anderson (44:37)

Okay,

who's your favorite CEO to follow?

Josh (44:41)

man,

that's a, it's a great question. I'd have to say Eric Schmidt, ⁓ he's like next level, maybe the best operator in the whole world, ⁓ just insane story. And, ⁓ I've had the opportunity to learn some things from him directly and work with him through a couple of different things. And so, but I think he's awesome.

Mark Petruzzi (45:02)

Very cool. Okay, a tool other than CoFrame that every growth leader should be using.

Josh (45:11)

man. Well, I think it's really, really important to have a really solid sense of your data for sure. So some type of, some type of analytics platform, Amplitude's a really great one. know, Adobe analytics, ⁓ post-hoc, et cetera. I think that, you know, the more you have a sense of what's happening in your business, the more you're going to be able to improve it and measure, measure those outcomes.

KK Anderson (45:39)

Question, do you have to have one of those to be able to use CoFrame?

Josh (45:42)

No, no, we actually come with full data, you know, analytics included, but we do plug into these, these systems.

KK Anderson (45:49)

Okay, now for my favorite question. Advice that you would give your 21 year old self.

Josh (45:55)

that's a good

one. man. ⁓ Okay. So I think that what I would probably say is like, like basically hype is not the same as substance. You know, I've, I've, I've seen a lot of, a lot of hype in my career so far. ⁓ And, you know, easy come easy go. Like things will just like, there'll be bubbles, they'll collapse and there'll be things that

that what you want to be doing is basically subtracting the noise to try to find the true signal and keep this level of groundedness to try to figure out what is truly valuable here and think from first principles what is going to be durable and sustain over time. And so I'd really urge myself, I guess, to really focus on the substance.

Mark Petruzzi (46:45)

Oh, I love that, Josh. And as a, know, as a reoccurring, you know, individual who's launched different companies, been CEO of multiple companies at this point, I love to have you, I love to hear you thinking about that in those terms. Because, you know, I have a lot of friends who have done the same from, you know, different company to the next and...

they start doing it a few times at the CEO level and they start to think that's their job is to always drive that hype through the market. And even sometimes within their own organization, they think they need to have credibly positive energy in their business at all times. And that's not life as we know it. And ⁓ having that realistic approach is really impressive.

Josh, thank you so much for taking the time with us. This was great and we're excited as we go along to learn more about Code Frame and see how we can leverage that into some of the work we do with clients.

Josh (47:54)

It's been a pleasure, Mark. Thanks so much for having me, Mark and KK. Really good to see you both.

KK Anderson (47:54)

Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you, Josh.

Mark Petruzzi (48:01)

Perfect, all right. Thanks, all. Thanks, Josh. Thanks, KK. Cheers.

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 the Cloud, Mike Milburn—former Chief Customer Officer at Salesforce and founding team member of Service Cloud—joins Mark Petruzzi and KK Anderson for a masterclass in aligning product and sales teams around a shared go-to-market mission.

Drawing from his 15+ years at Salesforce, Mike shares hard-won frameworks for building product roadmaps that sales can actually sell, developing trust between CROs and CPOs, and scaling alignment across growth stages. This is a blueprint for leaders who want revenue-generating product strategy—not just internal harmony.

What You’ll Learn:

• The Product–Sales Friction Point: How most teams mismanage this relationship and how to turn it into a revenue advantage.
• Revenue-Calorie Framework: Why Salesforce prioritized roadmap decisions by “calories” and how to balance innovation vs. renewals.
• V2MOM as a GTM Operating System: What the V2MOM framework taught Mike about prioritization, transparency, and shared accountability.
• From Anecdotes to Data: How to structure sales feedback into decision-ready inputs for product teams.
• Product + Sales = One Team: What world-class collaboration looks like—when sales leaders evangelize the roadmap and product leaders join customer conversations.

Key Topics:

• CRO and CPO relationship-building strategies
• Translating sales objections into roadmap investment
• The role of customer success in roadmap prioritization
• Quantifying “deal blockers” to influence product
• Running effective board conversations around product
• How “True to the Core” made Salesforce a customer-led company
• Scaling product-sales collaboration from startup to enterprise

Guest Spotlight: Mike Milburn

Mike Milburn is the former Chief Customer Officer at Salesforce and was part of the founding team of Service Cloud. Today, he serves as an advisor to multiple SaaS companies. His career centers on building GTM systems where product, sales, and customer success function as one growth engine.

Resources & Mentions:

• Framework: V2MOM – Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, Metrics
• Salesforce Event: “True to the Core” session at Dreamforce
• Recommended Book: Behind the Cloud by Marc Benioff
• Other Concepts: Revenue-calorie model, sales telemetry, deal blocker mapping

🎧 Listen now and follow Selling the Cloud for more insights from GTM leaders building high-growth, cross-functional teams. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Mark Petruzzi (00:03.044)

Welcome to today's episode of Selling the Cloud podcast. We're thrilled today to welcome Mike Milburn, former chief customer officer and many other things at Salesforce for I believe 17 years and current advisor to some incredible technology companies as well, many of which are connected to the Salesforce ecosystem. So 15 years at Salesforce.

during a very key time for the evolution of the firm. The transformation from true startup to enterprise giant that we all know and love today. When it comes down to it, what we'd like to cover today is a number of the frameworks that Mike has used to align product and sales team throughout his career and particularly through the Salesforce journey.

Four themes we'll explore today. The product sales friction point, why most companies get this wrong, building revenue driven product roadmaps, something Salesforce always did a really good job with, probably mostly led by Mike. Go to market execution, when product and sales team need to move as one, and scaling product sales alignment.

All right, let's jump on to topic one, the product sales friction point. Mike, you mentioned that product sales relationship is one of the most critical friction points for CROs, CEOs, and boards as well. What are the fundamental misunderstandings that typically create this tension?

Mike Milburn (01:47.64)

Thanks, Mark and KK. It's great to be here. I'm really glad that you guys are having this. I can't tell you how many times I've had this conversation in private. so having this conversation in public is just, it's a really neat thing and it's an honor to here. So congrats to that. So I guess I would just kind of like imagine the audience and I would imagine in any company that you're in.

And that kind of water cooler, or maybe you're in a car or an airplane and you're having a conversation. And if you're on the sales team, you're talking about, man, I wish I had different products or better products or some sort of anxiety around the product side. And then if you go to the other side of the aisle, imagine that same conversation, the door shuts in the product meeting and you're wondering why you can't sell it. And if you sort of put yourself into that.

mode of listening and that mode of parenting those organizations, that's a pretty frequent conversation. So I think that's the place to start, is like an acknowledgement from this virtual audience, how many of you guys have been in that position of hearing friction or anxiety from both the sales side to the product side or the product scene to the sales side.

KK Anderson (03:07.463)

So that's an excellent point. So when you arrive, let's say you arrive to a new company as a CRO and you discover, let's say that the product is difficult to sell. How do you approach that conversation with the product leadership team and with your board without just saying, hey guys, this product sucks, we can't sell it.

Mike Milburn (03:32.034)

Yeah. So I think first of all, let's start with the relationships between the CPO and the CRO. And let's start with if you're the CRO identifying the CPO as one of your critical stakeholders to your success. Obviously you're reporting into probably the COO or the CEO of the company, depending on the size and the maturity, but have you properly identified the product leader as one of the key stakeholders kind of colloquial?

Locally, I would say are they on your Christmas card list? Have you earned the right to build a relationship that allows you to send a Christmas card to the chief product officer? And so where I start that relationship is really If I'm the CRO, I want to meet the head of product. I want to understand their tenure at the company I want to understand their motivations and I want to understand the successes and failures that I've had with with my predecessors

if you're a new CRO, then there was probably somebody before you. And so what were the things that they did right? And what were the things that they did wrong? Typically where that goes is again, relationships take time to build. So we're sort of jumping into how do you build a trusted relationship with them? You're to have to deliver, but ultimately you want to give the chief product officer the, the trust that you're going to bring them.

real-time feedback from the field, you're gonna sell the products that are available, and you're gonna help bring them key insights from customers and partners on what are the things that they should be building. And we're gonna touch on that in a second, but those are really the key things, being able to sell what's available, being able to bring them trusted information about what's going on in the field, and help bring them guidance about where the market is going.

Mark Petruzzi (05:30.637)

So Mike, tell us about how you built a methodology for navigating this relationship at Salesforce. And how do you make this process kind of board ready and productive and collaborative rather than adversarial?

Mike Milburn (05:51.33)

Yeah, great question, Mark. So as a, first of all, as a backdrop, you know, I had the immense honor of being one of the guys that started Service Cloud on the founding team for Service Cloud at Salesforce. And of course, Service Cloud is now over $10 billion business inside of Salesforce. And I was there on day one when we booked the first, you know, 30 or 40K order way back in the early 2000s. So that's the framework that I'm going to use. Second is,

I think all the credit really goes to Mark and Parker, Mark Benioff and Parker Harris. They created a framework that we inherited, we modified and we enhanced. And that's what I'm going to talk about today. So the way that I think about it, Mark, is what we did in the early days of Salesforce is let's say that you had unit, I don't know, let's say you had 10 calories to burn on product.

And let's just for a moment say that all calories are equal, right? We would look at those and we would say, how many those calories are you gonna spend on new or innovation things? And how many products are you, or how many calories are you gonna spend on customer success? And so for argument's sake, let's just take 10 calories. And those calories really translate to resources or funding. But if I had 10 calories,

And I devote them all towards the front of the house or all towards sales. And that meant that I was going to create some debt on the renewal side or on the customer success side. And conversely, if I spent all 10 calories and I didn't create any new innovation, I might suffer on sales, but I would really be strong in customer success or renewals. So once you go away from the teeter totter,

And you go, well, the natural instinct is to peanut butter and to do five on each, let's say in this, in this hypothetical example. And I think what Parker really did was challenge that idea of peanut buttering and say, let's be really, really thoughtful, deliberate and challenging. And maybe you spent seven calories on sales and only three on customer success or vice versa.

Mike Milburn (08:10.134)

And let's really think about the trade-offs and let's make those data driven revenue generating success oriented decisions. And so where we took that team was we would take the product roadmap that was based off of that framework. And we would go to the sales leadership and we'd say, can you sell this? And the sales leadership would sign up to sell that. And I think, you know, that, conversation that we started with was.

can the product team create a roadmap that the sales team stands behind? And if you imagine that conversation, that's a very delicate conversation. The sales team has to take accountability for, if you're gonna go build something, then the sales team needs to be the one to stand up and say, if you build that, I'm gonna go sell it. There's always problems that come up with pricing or packaging or competition or any one of the various things that happen in the real life world, but.

The head of products job is to create a roadmap that is innovative and can support both sales and customer success, which I'm directly calling renewals, usage and adoption. So I think that was the really neat part is once we made a data driven decision, we could then look at our roadmap and say, if I remove one calories from sales, what are the sales impacts?

And what are the renewal impacts? And once you have that, the leaders of sales, success and product can all come together and they make the right decisions for the KPIs of the team. And of course that's where the CEO and the ELT come into play. But that becomes a really fun conversation when you have it, you know, when you have it laid out like that, like for this quarter or these two quarters, let's over rotate to sales. And yeah, we might create some customer success issues.

If everyone's on the same page and there's no blame game come when the, when the customers incur issues or problems, there's no finger pointing. It's we all made this decision together. And conversely, if you make a decision to go renew all your customers, then that's going to have a lot of benefits and then you might have some, some, sales friction. So it's really creating that alignment and transparency that I was really lucky to be a part of and, mature that process.

Mark Petruzzi (10:29.315)

So Mike, before we go into our next question, I'm going to open this up a little more strategically. How much did the approach that Mark drove right from the beginning of beat a mom? How much did that get into some of this? Is the methodology that you're talking about building, is it tied to beat a mom or to just kind of work in and integrate on its own along the way?

Mike Milburn (10:58.828)

Yeah, great question, Mark. So I think of the V2Mom is really a corporate operating plan. And, you know, I've got to be candid and say, think when I first joined and I was baptized in the V2Mom process, I think I wasn't quite on board with how important it was to a company. After a couple of years, I guess I would go back and restate that and say the V2Mom was one of the most important things that Salesforce has as an asset.

And it's one of the most important things that I learned. And it's one piece of advice that I've given and driven to any company that I've been lucky enough to work with is the essence of the V2Mom is a corporate operating plan that the exec team creates and they vote on together. And it decides the company's vision, values, methods, obstacles, and metrics. Essentially, what is the operating plan? And if you do it every year, then you're allowed to pivot and change at the speed of business, no matter what size company you are.

So think it's incredibly modern. The relationship between the V2Mom and the product roadmap is really simple. If the number one V2Mom is growth, and let's say growth means sales and sales is over customer success, then you should be allowed to spend more of your product calories making products that the sales team wants you to sell. If the V2Mom is customer success is number one, then

you know, voted on that by the exec team, then you might change the priorities and saying, let's spend more calories together, making products, goods and services that help renewability. So the relationship between the V2 mom, the product roadmap, the sales leadership, the success leadership is the success leadership is it's all part of the exact same formula that drives the corporate operating plan.

KK Anderson (12:56.199)

And so where like what role do you see the CEO playing out all of this kind of? Facilitating it all you know running them running the balance

Mike Milburn (13:06.606)

Yeah. So, you we were pretty lucky. We had, you know, we had the legendary Mark Benioff running on that show. And what Mark enabled us to do was he empowered us to create a forum where you're allowed to have a healthy conversation about the VT mom. And I vividly remember, I mean, so many of these meetings all kind of blur together because they were 15, 20 years ago, but I remember somebody in the company standing up and saying, I don't agree with this.

KK Anderson (13:11.558)

Yeah.

Mike Milburn (13:33.13)

Maybe the person was an individual contributor, maybe they were an influencer, but when they challenged it, was somebody in the Roman Senate saying, hey, you guys built this, I don't agree with it. And that transparency and accountability was really important. Mark drove that culture. Everyone owned the V2 Mom. Number two was you were allowed to deputize other people for your V2 Mom.

So let me make up a little hypothetical situation here. Let's say that Mark is, let's pretend that I'm the CEO, Mark's the head of sales and KK, you're the head of products. And I would say, know, is a number one priority that we sell more and everyone goes, yeah. Well, if Mark's job is the head of sales and your job is the head of product, then you inherit those priorities. And so that's where you can't be parochial or you can't be political. You've got to do the right thing.

on the V2Mom for everyone else. And it was more than a faux pas to stand up in a V2Mom meeting and be self-serving. You had to use the V2Mom as the doctrine on how you were going to operate your organization. And you were allowed to deputize other folks. Again, part of the V2Mom conversation that I didn't say earlier was it drives success in a matrix organization.

KK Anderson (15:00.006)

you

Mike Milburn (15:00.066)

There's some organizations that are more top-down, more command and control, maybe more military or more organizations. And a lot of modern organizations, you know, the CPO and the CRO might not ever report into the same person. They might be dotted lines into the CEO or they might, their peers, right? And so the V2 mom became almost navigate the V2 mom without having to go to the CEO.

KK Anderson (15:06.311)

you

Mike Milburn (15:30.124)

And when you're empowered as as a, an executive in a company to navigate that without having to go and ask permission or to have somebody navigate those rules. you tend to, you tend to come to the right decision.

KK Anderson (15:44.423)

You know, it's ironic. Mark and I are sitting here nodding our heads thinking, this is exactly what AGS needed to hear right now. Right? You know, me, every company is no matter the size, is they're navigating growth and navigating our, you know, everything. It's so important. And for the audience who's probably like Googling what is V2Mom right now, can you give an explanation of Salesforce's framework that they've made famous?

Mark Petruzzi (15:51.939)

I that guy.

Mike Milburn (15:52.11)

Thanks

Mike Milburn (15:55.841)

Really?

Mike Milburn (16:11.586)

Yep, absolutely. Okay. So it's called the V2 mom and it stands for vision values, methods, obstacles, and metrics. And so the way that I think about it is, is the vision and values or things that the exec team created and they would socialize for approval and stakeholder value with the company. So that's the first, the V2 part. The mom part is where the work gets done. The methods, obstacles, and metrics.

And so you can YouTube V2Mom. You see a lot of companies have borrowed it, but essentially there's about 10 V2Mom methods. And those could be things like say which product has a higher priority. It could mean revenue. It could mean culture. remember when, when one year when we were really going against Siebel and there was a fear that we would turn into Siebel. I think the number one method on the V2Mom was culture.

And so that trumped growth. So the M, the first M is methods. That's the kind of how, then the obstacles are what are the things that are going get in the way. And there's a one-to-one ratio between obstacles and methods. And then the measurements are how are you going to get measured on whatever method you wanted? And the, what the execs team's job was to create all the methods and then prioritize those.

And one of the really neat moments that I saw happen over and over again was a public discussion on which method is more important. And it sounds like so innocuous. It sounds so easy. But if you were to say, what's more important sales or success? That's a hard one. Cause the more you sell, the more you have to renew, the more you renew, the easier sales get and the more references you get. Which is more important, partnership growth versus

creating a brand. Geez, Salesforce has created an amazing brand. It took time to do that, which is more important. Employee success or creating a great dream force, which is more important, having a great dream force or having 10 events locally or throughout the geos. And so once you sort of create that framework to have healthy discussion, then

Mike Milburn (18:35.478)

then you kind of get everybody on the same page. So it's a corporate operating plan for the modern SaaS company.

Mark Petruzzi (18:42.711)

Yeah, and what I love about all of that, is you kind of ties me back to what you said at the beginning and that this calorie breakdown perspective that when you look at it that way, and very few companies do, right? Very few CEOs do. Most CEOs kind of come in to these QBR meetings or wherever they're addressing a team and they're like, know, sales, sales, sales, we need to grow, we need to grow.

And then they turn around and they're like, then they start talking about customer success. And they're like, well, customer success has to be perfect in this way and have to do that. But it's not. It is a zero sum game, even in a fast growing company. the process of being mature and analyzing, hey, if we want to grow a little faster,

we're going to have to do some things that are going to be a trade off on customer success. Or if we really, really need to make sure that customer success for the next couple quarters is, you know, that our retention is off the charts, then we have to slow down and accept a couple percentage points less on our growth. That doesn't happen often in companies. And I love the way you're positioning it thus far. Let's kick into topic two.

Building revenue driven product roadmaps. KK, why don't you lead us the first question there.

KK Anderson (20:11.239)

So I'm always going to start with sales because that's my passion. And so when we think about SaaS organizations and our clients, how do you ensure that sales feedback actually influences the product roadmap? That's where I think one of the greatest breakdowns is. And honestly,

It's that frontline seller who's having a lot of these conversations and the solution architects. That's the feedback that we need to go up. Right. So how do you do that?

Mike Milburn (20:45.858)

Yep.

So this is the, I'd like everybody on the podcast to kind of close your eyes and imagine this meeting. You're in a QBR, you're in your exec meeting and it's your reporting on your results for the quarter. You're getting ready for your next board meeting of any size and scope. And you're looking at, you're the CRO and you're looking at your results.

You're looking at your feature pipeline. You're looking at amount of head count and you're painting a vision for the company on where you're going to go. And what if you had a slide that, that, that said for every opportunity, here's the quantifiable problems that we're facing in the field. In other words, you know, you just kind of invoke this frontline sales and then there's,

There's RVPs and they go AVPs and by the time it gets up to the CRO, how do you get feedback? And the image that I'm trying to conjure up is, and this might sound low level, but let's start here to get to the high level. What if on every opportunity there was a way to capture objections? And it wasn't a free text field. It was a data driven format. Is it pricing? it, is it competitive? Is it a feature or function?

KK Anderson (21:48.027)

Uh-huh.

Mike Milburn (22:13.654)

And that opportunity has a dollar sign value associated to it. So if all the reps in the field were responsible for adding in all of their objections at the, at the infantry level, at the deal level, and the CRO could run a report and say, here's the number of opportunities that I'm facing where I have pricing as a problem. And here's the accumulated dollar sign that is impacted.

Or I'm facing a feature and function gap, or I'm facing a critical piece of functionality that will require &A. Whatever it is, if you can associate deal friction with the number of deals and the amount of ARR or the amount of revenue that's associated, now you're having an exact conversation. It's not emotional. You're saying I've got X number of dollars. I'm going to choose 50 million or 5 million or 5

KK Anderson (23:05.991)

Mm-hmm.

Mike Milburn (23:11.074)

beans, whatever vector you want. And here is the data behind it that is causing me friction. Then the product organization or the partner organization or any other organization, they can ask you questions about it. They can second guess the quality of the data or what some of it means, but it's really hard to have. It's really easy to have a great conversation. If you come to that meeting with, Hey guys, our second half pipeline.

or X amount of revenue. And here are the three biggest blockers we're having to make the second half of the year. We need a flex capacitor. We need more aggressive POC pricing. And we'd really like exec sponsorship on the following 10 deals because we're having a lot of competitive pressure. Now it becomes a fulfillment opportunity for the rest of exec team to rally behind you instead of that familiar pattern of

what's happening with the deals and could have, should have, would have kind of that soft squishy. If the CRO can bring concrete examples of what they need to that meeting, then you're getting this CPO on board with you to build the right things to deliver more revenue.

Mark Petruzzi (24:30.253)

really good points there, Mike. So, okay, so how do you do, know, companies are getting customer requests, customer feedback every minute of every day. How do you determine, just how do you accept that into the process? How do you get that data into your system first? And then...

What are the criteria that should help you really drive and make it affect product decisions that will move revenue versus what may make one client feel good or even what may make the company feel good? Like we may look at this and say, yeah, this is an important one. This is important. But at end of the day, if it's not going to move revenue, it's got to be in a different place in that product roadmap.

How have you done such a great job with that throughout your entire career?

Mike Milburn (25:28.664)

You try and make the process easy, Mark. You try and make it transparent and you try to remove some of the black box. First of all, you know, the, the axiom of feedback as a gift is, is not just true if you're not getting feedback, like you're doing something very, very wrong. So let's just start with the sales side. Do you have a system that can quantify from the SEs and the sales team, the blockers that are getting in the way to sell the deal?

Do you have that? That is a binary yes or no question. And then can you summarize that by segment or geo? So part of what you implied by that question is if I have a sales team that's selling an SMB in North America and an enterprise team that is selling in Europe and they're asking for things, how do you distill those two things into a criteria?

that creates action? And the simple answer is revenue. So let's just make up some, let's just make up something to talk about. Let's say your SMB team has 20 deals, each valued at $1. Right? And that's in North America, that's $20. But your EMEA team, it wants something that is $100, but there's only one deal.

And you look at everyone and let's assume that to build those two products is the same amount of calories. Cause when you get different calories, then all of a sudden you're invoking a different vector. But first of all, can you have that conversation? This is no different than having a conversation with your family about where to go on vacation. Do you go on two little vacations and for a couple of days, you'd be on one big vacation. The world's navigated that for a long time, but now all of a sudden the sales conversation is difficult with your product team.

As a CRO, can you articulate the number of deals by segment and exactly what the blockers are? Yes or no. If you do not have that mechanism in place, then I would encourage you to use a CRM like Salesforce to create those objects. And you simply, it's part of your sales operations criteria. Every deal gets a blockers or pathways and it's not a free text.

Mike Milburn (27:49.12)

It is the top lockers and you're able to, sales ops can help you navigate, and, and run those reports. So that's the first side of it. Then, then the second side of it is as an exec team, do you have the framework to be able to decide and have that conversation? I think this is where a lot of these conversations stall is the fear that you have been building the wrong things or, or are you listening in the right way? Maybe.

You know, I just said it in a very blunt way, but if you're going to get to transparency, you've got to be able to listen and then you've got to be able to make roadmap decisions based off it. So, you know, I would say, regardless of what's happened in the past from the product and sales organizations, this is your opportunity to reset. Listen to what the sales team is telling you and then build a roadmap that addresses those. And if you're not going to address it, then just like, just like we talked about earlier, say.

we're gonna make these other decisions. And if you keep seeing this deal friction, we're sympathizing with you and we're not ignoring it. On the reverse side, on the customer success side, it's anyone that's a customer needs to be able to submit the feedback into your organization to tell you what is causing them to stop or renewal. And part of the unspoken hard part here is time.

A product roadmap usually takes a year to effect, which ironically is why Salesforce's roadmap is three RR was three RR three releases a year. So if you're going to get something into the roadmap, it might take you three releases to get that through the system. So you've got to have your radar out both on the sales and server sales and success side long enough to listen and impact that roadmap. The, so that's the time vector then.

That's all systematic and programmatic. And again, you should be able to report that to the CEO. You should be able to report that to the board. Then you have the live functions. And so this is actually a really neat story, but if you were to go on YouTube and you go true to the core, one of the most profound sessions that occurred, that occurs every dream force is usually it's Parker led, but somebody on the product team gets up.

Mike Milburn (30:14.578)

And the audience can range from five to 10,000 people. And they lead a conversation of, we being authentic with our roadmap? And this is a really neat conversation because there is no sales team. There's no success team. It's just the customer and Salesforce on stage. And what Parker does a great job of it is navigating. Every customer is going to have wants and needs. Everyone's got their individual requirements, et cetera.

And those fit either in, no, we're not going to do that. It's the wrong thing for us to build. We're thinking about it or here's where it's going to be built. And over time, what I think is really neat about true to the core is it shows Salesforce commitment to listening. It shows the customer's commitment towards giving that feedback. And I don't have any data or stats on it, but I would guess that, you know,

The reason why, the reason why that's so effective is the customers feel that their voice matters. And so if you combine both those things and you have sales radar and sales intelligence telling you what is necessary to drive a sale. And then you have customer intelligence coming through and saying, what do you intend to build?

And then you have something like true to the core, it could be exec round tables, or it could be dinners or whatever mechanism the company feels comfortable. Dreamforce is a very unique opportunity. What you see there is sort of like checks and balances, sort of like the foundation of the United States, right? We've got three different, bodies that help govern the United States. You have the sales team giving you feedback, the success team giving you feedback, and then you have actual customers. You take all three of those pieces of feedback and you look at the roadmap and you should be able to say.

KK Anderson (31:51.495)

with customers.

Mike Milburn (31:56.096)

Am I building the right things together?

KK Anderson (31:59.463)

And I wonder how often what the customer says is different in fact than the others

Mike Milburn (32:06.338)

You know, it happens. mean, I remember some very contentious, true to the core sessions and you kind of have to be candid and say, is this the right thing for the company to build? mean, the more customers you get, the more the need, do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the needs of the individual. Also here is the difference between like core product and customizable. So it's one thing for customer to say, I want this turnkey.

KK Anderson (32:28.977)

Mm-hmm.

Mike Milburn (32:32.918)

It's another thing to say you could do this and here's how you would do that. My opinion is that customers want transparency. And just because a customer wants something doesn't mean they should build it, but they deserve to be, they deserve to be heard.

KK Anderson (32:47.894)

I have a question. Just real quick, Mark, if I could, you talk about the three releases a year and that's... It feels like nowadays, that's just... Everyone wants something in the moment. They want real time. They want changes faster. want... I mean, I know it's not really a part of this topic per se, but I guess it kind of is. It's product roadmap and it's more...

Mark Petruzzi (32:48.724)

You know what's in...

KK Anderson (33:15.215)

in a real time, faster environment? Like how is the speed of business changing how SaaS companies are releasing and updating?

Mike Milburn (33:27.234)

Yeah. So this is a great topic. mean, I think we pioneered three releases a day, you know, almost 20 years ago. I guess the way I think about what Salesforce did with 3RR was it gave you some ability to have certainty to what is coming next, what you believe is coming, and then what you believe is coming a little bit longer out. So you sort of know directionally what's happening and it was transparent.

The, I felt that same anxiety many times of customers like, want this today and I want it today. I think that's tempered or weathered with building in the right way, building trust, building safety, building security. Some things take more than a day or a week or a month to build. The important thing is that does the company know where, does the customer know where you stand as an organization? Are you being heard?

And are you delivering on it? So, you know, we, I personally felt after, after being so many, after being so many, ABCs, executive briefing sessions or customer sessions or dream forces that the customer's desire to have it today is that was less important than Salesforce being able to listen and being able to build the right data driven machinery.

It also worked where if a customer said, I want X and nobody had ever heard it, you could tell the customer, you know what? You're the only customer that we've ever heard that's asked for this. And that worked in our favor a lot of times too. So if you speed that up today and people want, know, just in time releases or they want a release every two days, I don't think it changes the equation too much. Can you quantify what is being necessary in order to sell more products?

Can you quantify what is being used to renew more products? And if you can deliver it on a frequency of three times a year, five times a year, once a month, once a day, that's great. But I don't think it changes the overall calculus of, you listening to your sales team? Are you listening to your success team? Are you listening to your renewals team? are you, Ergo, you listening to your customers?

Mark Petruzzi (35:49.348)

Excellent. All right, let's go to our third topic here and go to market execution and when product and sales teams move as one. Tell us a little bit about what world class looks like around product, sales, execution. And when we use that term move as one, I've heard you use that term and that's why I'm asking it.

What does it mean for product and sales to move as one?

Mike Milburn (36:19.788)

Yeah. So.

Mike Milburn (36:24.5)

One of the great parts that I remember about our internal QBRs at Salesforce was having the sales team kick off or the sales team wrap up one of my product conversations. And imagine your CRO standing up and saying, I'm not the chief product officer.

Or I'm not heading up product, but I'm excited about the roadmap and here's why I'm excited. I'm going to go sell this because I believe in it. Now, all of a sudden you're showing alignment with your, with your critical sales component. And I think a lot of the internal meetings turn into sales is the sales job. Product is the product job and everyone just kind of goes off into their silos. So it starts with that message. Does the head of sales.

Can they deliver the product roadmap? Can the head of sales demo the product? And this is something that I just find really, really unique and interesting, but I mean, I think it's still the case today that almost every executive at Salesforce is responsible for demoing their product. And there's products that it doesn't make sense and there's really technical and I'm sure we can find corner cases, but it's pretty powerful when the head of sales is able to...

KK Anderson (37:18.897)

Alright.

Mike Milburn (37:43.064)

demo in some capacity, even if it's not the world's greatest demo. So I think those two things are one and two. Three is almost no airspace between the roadmap and the sales team. We've touched on it all throughout this conversation, Mark, but you should never ever hear from any sales team. man, I wish our roadmap was different. And I think you hear a lot of that kind of in the background or hallway conversations or exit interviews or.

Maybe I'm linked in. Sometimes you hear a lot of that. And conversely, from the product team, selling is hard. And so when you involve the product team in selling and you start to see the art of selling and the science of selling, you're going to see a lot of of sympathies and a lot of energies, know, timely today. Just today, I saw.

a CRO for one of the companies I led, he left one company and went to a new company. And when you see the product team respond to that and saying, you're going to do great, John, keep going, we loved working with you. I think that's the job of a CRO is to build those relationships that maybe said a different way. If a CRO is interviewing for their next job,

Why wouldn't the chief product officer be one of their key endorse ease or endorsements? That would be a true testimony.

KK Anderson (39:12.455)

Yeah, it really would. And, you know, take the CMO, the CPO and everybody. what's your, we have recently recorded a podcast with Kathy Minter and she talked a lot about the concept of the unified CRO and having sort of one leader that is overseeing marketing, overseeing product, overseeing customer success and in that way, rather than.

know, silent. What are your thoughts around that? Some of what you just said had me thinking.

Mike Milburn (39:48.364)

Yeah, I think there's some really exciting, I think there's been some, I think there's really exciting new roles that have been created both from CEOs and CROs, you know, and I think the CRO that is just revenue generating or just sales generating, think, I mean, first of all, it's an incredible job with a lot of responsibility and a lot of accountability.

But the inputs for that are things like marketing and branding, top of the funnel, the creation of pipeline. So if we're able to understand and navigate brand and marketing, then that's almost a next generation CRO leader. Same thing with system engineering. I've seen customer success fall in there. So it really depends on kind of the company and the investors and kind of the...

Also the candidate and the kind of role behind it. mean, at Salesforce, if you look at the current organization, it would be really bad form if you were a sales leader and you couldn't articulate the product or you couldn't articulate the message. Salesforce is lucky. 25 years later, everyone's on brand, everyone's on message. They have the enablement departments to go through that. So I think part of what you're asking, KK, is like you have

You have smaller companies, medium companies, bigger companies. You have all these different sizes of companies. Then you have private equity investors. And I think this is also an important point that, you know, in the in kind of the previous model, when companies were publicly traded or that was your goal is to IPO and be publicly traded company. Who was your accountable? Who is your accountable stakeholder? Wall Street, the stock price, right?

Now with private equity, they have a different set of goals, a different set of goals and a different timeframe for that. So what is the organizational structure that's going to drive value creation? And so I think you're seeing some consolidation in some of those roles, which is really exciting.

Mark Petruzzi (41:59.556)

And Mike, think you just set up our next podcast together and I don't think we've ever brought you by me back super fast, even though we've had amazing guests along the way. But I think we have to have a discussion after this about getting you back in in the next few weeks and talking and going more deeply into that private equity, private equity and sales, private equity and how that affects strategy within.

All these companies that you work with and and we do KK myself as well Yes, we're running lower on time here, but I'd like to get into topic for scaling product sales alignment frameworks for high growth organizations and I think the the core item here is when you when you scale from early stage startup to enterprise

How does this product sales relationship need to evolve? And how do you make that work? Because we all know these early stage companies of today are going to be the sales force of 2030. So, or at least a couple of them are. Not many, but a couple. And how do you navigate in each environment to get to that full scalability?

Mike Milburn (43:24.096)

Yeah, great question, Mark. you know, with all the turnover, all the growth and all the pace and speed that the tech ecosystem is in, here's a couple pieces of guidance. if you're the CRO and there was an impromptu board meeting, could you articulate the product roadmap and give your editorial and a data-driven decision on why it's good or conversely why it's bad?

Not subjective, not your opinion, but can you give a data-driven, supportable articulation of the product roadmap that, you know, that can you articulate that? That's thing one. Thing two is, are you listening to the customers in your, again, your sales teams are spending all of their time with customers. Are you bringing the product organization

critical information about the customers buying decisions, their needs, their wants, and are you giving, are you helping another organization build the right roadmap? Number three is, have you done, here's a litmus test one. Have you done a product tour with your top customers and your CPO? Nothing will flush out a correct alignment.

or an incorrect alignment better than a dinner or lunch or breakfast with 10 customers, head of sales and the head of product. There's nowhere to go. The door shuts. They start asking questions. What about this? How does this work? Can you have you done that before? And so I think those are three things. If I had to invoke a fourth one, it would be imagine your board meeting and reverse it.

Imagine presenting to either your private equity investors or the public counsel and imagine talking about the product roadmap and your alignment with your CPO. That's, think, what your job is as CRO is to build that alignment and build that trust.

KK Anderson (45:30.449)

So when you were in the beginnings of Service Cloud and you were there with a front row seat, what, any stories come to mind around how that scale and what that experience was like?

Mike Milburn (45:40.268)

Yeah. I think I shared this earlier. The first meeting I had when I was the GM, was terrified. I thought I was responsible for innovation and I had to figure out all this stuff. I was very, very intimidated by that opportunity. Parker leaned over and he made it just real normal. goes, just listen to what they say. Just listen.

And I listened to the sales team talk about, you know, here's the size of the opportunities. Here's the data coming. Here's the telemetry coming out of sales. And then I listened to the telemetry coming out of success. And the picture that came out of that was maybe it was 80%. Right. It was let's build this to drive more sales. Let's build this to build, to help do success. And I didn't have enough calories to, to, to do everything. So then I asked for help and it was, peer group.

How would you slice this? Would you do 80, 20, 20, 80, 50, 50, 70, 30? And I navigated that success together. And eventually it was the head of sales who became incredibly supportive of my roadmap in service cloud, which led to growth. And so the head of sales became one of our biggest advocates. so I think that story, KK, kind of, you know, while it was...

very, very intimidating and I had a of anxiety going to that meeting. It's sort of, reflect on that and Parker was exactly right. If you listen to what the sales team is providing in data driven organization, then the roadmap becomes almost a fulfillment exercise of how are you going to deliver that in the shortest amount of time? And the innovation is going to come from your product and engineering organizations on how you're going to fulfill the most amount of those things in the shortest amount of time.

Mark Petruzzi (47:35.232)

Excellent. All right, let's jump into our rapid fire segment here because I can't wait to hear some of these here from your perspective. So, you you're not a CRO. know, that's not kind of not your core, even though you've done so many amazing things over your career. So I guess this question becomes, you know, when in your career have you been asked to sell and what what product or service

was the first one you've ever really got your hands around.

Mike Milburn (48:09.506)

Yeah. So I've carried a bag. Actually, Mark, I've been responsible. I've never carried a bag from an AE perspective, but I've been responsible for revenue four or five times in my career. And believe it or not, the first is going back to Salesforce. At a matrix organization, I had no salespeople reporting to me and I had all the accountability of revenue. So I had to stand up in front of Mark and team and the board and, and, and, and announce that. So.

That was really the first one. And then every company since then, I've had some relationship, either direct or indirect, with the ownership of revenue.

KK Anderson (48:50.983)

Okay, who is your favorite, let's say CEO or C-level business mentor to follow?

Mike Milburn (48:59.34)

Yeah. So I think, so first of all, I keep an internal board of directors. And for me, what my internal board and my internal mentor do is, is they allow me to be accountable to people that I value. And one of the sales leaders that was at Salesforce, that was running one third of the company for a large majority of that time was a gentleman named Dan Del Degan, affectionately known as Triple D.

And, Dan came out of Oracle and then was it hugely influential in the growth of Salesforce. Dan later on, joined Greg Buchholz, the founder and CEO of Spring CM and Dan became the president and they sold Spring to DocuSign. Dan is probably the, gentleman that I count as my chairman of my board to, to hold myself accountable, but

I think the way that he operates in his value systems, a sales oriented to the topic of this conversation, a sales oriented CEO, I count Dan the top of that list.

Mark Petruzzi (50:03.203)

Excellent. So yeah, what about a tool that every product leader, well, let's do two of them here. Since you've managed these in a dotted line way, you're responsible for this revenue, you get to see the good, bad, and the ugly, and you get to see it from a slightly different vantage point than if you were.

a CRO managing that team day to day, which I think is going to give you even better insights to these questions. So what tool would you recommend every sales leader use to ensure they are aligned with the organization? And then is it any different for a product leader, any different recommendations there as well?

Mike Milburn (50:48.578)

Yeah. So I had the, I had the opportunity to build these tools. actually the first company I left after Salesforce was Salsify and we built both of these tools natively mark. chose Salesforce for those things. as a, as a platform, on the, on the sales side, think building the data model to be able to support what is sales need. I think it makes sense to build natively on Salesforce. It's close to the opportunity. It's close to.

leads opportunities, close one, time in sales stage, all of that makes it very, very simple. On the reverse side, it's really about usage and adoption. So, you know, there's a number of enterprise tools. I don't think I'm wedded. don't have a favorite, but what I want to know as CPO is who's using the products and what does usage and adoption look like?

from a telemetry standpoint on a good customer and what does it look like on a bad customer? So I almost think about like, I want the customer's name redacted and I wanna see usage and adoption and I wanna see those trends and I wanna see what's working and what's not working. Then I wanna start asking questions. So every product has got their own internal telemetry tools.

I'm not wedded to any of them, but I really believe in usage and adoption to drive the customer success product roadmap.

KK Anderson (52:23.079)

Nice. Okay Mike, what advice would you give your 21 year old self?

Mike Milburn (52:30.95)

I would give the advice that if I could imagine the number one relationship to build, would be the relationship between sales and products and never ever have a conversation that sounded or looked parochial about. wish sales did something different. I wish services did something different. I think there's a wonderful skill of empathy. And if you're a product person and empathize how hard it is to carry a bag and you're

family's livelihood is dependent on you selling something in some frequency, and you reverse that from a sales position, understand how hard it is to ship and QA and deliver products. I think it's the empathy between sales and service, sales and product, I think is just something I wish I'd spent more time on earlier in my career.

Mark Petruzzi (53:19.649)

I mean, Mike, isn't it just the kind of the secrets of life, you know, having that that empathy in every situation and anybody you work with or coordinate with from a business or personal perspective. So I love the way you just described that. All right, let's close up on.

Let's just say this from a product manager, a product manager perspective, somebody who is the CPO taking that role for the first time. Are there any books that can give a little bit of the tricks in the trade that you've read or do you just need to get the work and write that so we all have that insight?

Mike Milburn (54:01.41)

You know, it's a great question. The one that comes to mind is actually Mark's first book. I think it was Behind the Cloud. And it just boils it down into such, from what I remember, it's been a couple of years since I read it, Mark, but it just boils it down into the raw distilling of what it takes to create a product and get people to sell it, use it, and adopt it. And, you know, in those early days, in the first five to 10 years of Salesforce,

We did so much evangelizing, so much listening, but there was so much passion behind it. And so I think that's probably a pretty good place to start.

Mark Petruzzi (54:39.615)

Excellent. Well, we have kept you a minute more than we asked so we want to keep you on schedule for your day But Mike, this is such an honor. It was so great to to dive deep into some of these subjects with you So great that I feel like we should do it again, but we'll figure that one out from here

KK Anderson (54:56.423)

Thank

Mike Milburn (54:58.36)

Sounds good, guys. We'll talk to you soon. Great to be here. Cheers. Bye-bye.

KK Anderson (55:00.313)

Thanks Mike.

Mark Petruzzi (55:00.727)

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.

In this episode of Selling the Cloud, Mike Milburn—former Chief Customer Officer at Salesforce and founding team member of Service Cloud—joins Mark Petruzzi and KK Anderson for a masterclass in aligning product and sales teams around a shared go-to-market mission.

Drawing from his 15+ years at Salesforce, Mike shares hard-won frameworks for building product roadmaps that sales can actually sell, developing trust between CROs and CPOs, and scaling alignment across growth stages. This is a blueprint for leaders who want revenue-generating product strategy—not just internal harmony.

What You’ll Learn:

• The Product–Sales Friction Point: How most teams mismanage this relationship and how to turn it into a revenue advantage.
• Revenue-Calorie Framework: Why Salesforce prioritized roadmap decisions by “calories” and how to balance innovation vs. renewals.
• V2MOM as a GTM Operating System: What the V2MOM framework taught Mike about prioritization, transparency, and shared accountability.
• From Anecdotes to Data: How to structure sales feedback into decision-ready inputs for product teams.
• Product + Sales = One Team: What world-class collaboration looks like—when sales leaders evangelize the roadmap and product leaders join customer conversations.

Key Topics:

• CRO and CPO relationship-building strategies
• Translating sales objections into roadmap investment
• The role of customer success in roadmap prioritization
• Quantifying “deal blockers” to influence product
• Running effective board conversations around product
• How “True to the Core” made Salesforce a customer-led company
• Scaling product-sales collaboration from startup to enterprise

Guest Spotlight: Mike Milburn

Mike Milburn is the former Chief Customer Officer at Salesforce and was part of the founding team of Service Cloud. Today, he serves as an advisor to multiple SaaS companies. His career centers on building GTM systems where product, sales, and customer success function as one growth engine.

Resources & Mentions:

• Framework: V2MOM – Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, Metrics
• Salesforce Event: “True to the Core” session at Dreamforce
• Recommended Book: Behind the Cloud by Marc Benioff
• Other Concepts: Revenue-calorie model, sales telemetry, deal blocker mapping

🎧 Listen now and follow Selling the Cloud for more insights from GTM leaders building high-growth, cross-functional teams. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Mark Petruzzi (00:03.044)

Welcome to today's episode of Selling the Cloud podcast. We're thrilled today to welcome Mike Milburn, former chief customer officer and many other things at Salesforce for I believe 17 years and current advisor to some incredible technology companies as well, many of which are connected to the Salesforce ecosystem. So 15 years at Salesforce.

during a very key time for the evolution of the firm. The transformation from true startup to enterprise giant that we all know and love today. When it comes down to it, what we'd like to cover today is a number of the frameworks that Mike has used to align product and sales team throughout his career and particularly through the Salesforce journey.

Four themes we'll explore today. The product sales friction point, why most companies get this wrong, building revenue driven product roadmaps, something Salesforce always did a really good job with, probably mostly led by Mike. Go to market execution, when product and sales team need to move as one, and scaling product sales alignment.

All right, let's jump on to topic one, the product sales friction point. Mike, you mentioned that product sales relationship is one of the most critical friction points for CROs, CEOs, and boards as well. What are the fundamental misunderstandings that typically create this tension?

Mike Milburn (01:47.64)

Thanks, Mark and KK. It's great to be here. I'm really glad that you guys are having this. I can't tell you how many times I've had this conversation in private. so having this conversation in public is just, it's a really neat thing and it's an honor to here. So congrats to that. So I guess I would just kind of like imagine the audience and I would imagine in any company that you're in.

And that kind of water cooler, or maybe you're in a car or an airplane and you're having a conversation. And if you're on the sales team, you're talking about, man, I wish I had different products or better products or some sort of anxiety around the product side. And then if you go to the other side of the aisle, imagine that same conversation, the door shuts in the product meeting and you're wondering why you can't sell it. And if you sort of put yourself into that.

mode of listening and that mode of parenting those organizations, that's a pretty frequent conversation. So I think that's the place to start, is like an acknowledgement from this virtual audience, how many of you guys have been in that position of hearing friction or anxiety from both the sales side to the product side or the product scene to the sales side.

KK Anderson (03:07.463)

So that's an excellent point. So when you arrive, let's say you arrive to a new company as a CRO and you discover, let's say that the product is difficult to sell. How do you approach that conversation with the product leadership team and with your board without just saying, hey guys, this product sucks, we can't sell it.

Mike Milburn (03:32.034)

Yeah. So I think first of all, let's start with the relationships between the CPO and the CRO. And let's start with if you're the CRO identifying the CPO as one of your critical stakeholders to your success. Obviously you're reporting into probably the COO or the CEO of the company, depending on the size and the maturity, but have you properly identified the product leader as one of the key stakeholders kind of colloquial?

Locally, I would say are they on your Christmas card list? Have you earned the right to build a relationship that allows you to send a Christmas card to the chief product officer? And so where I start that relationship is really If I'm the CRO, I want to meet the head of product. I want to understand their tenure at the company I want to understand their motivations and I want to understand the successes and failures that I've had with with my predecessors

if you're a new CRO, then there was probably somebody before you. And so what were the things that they did right? And what were the things that they did wrong? Typically where that goes is again, relationships take time to build. So we're sort of jumping into how do you build a trusted relationship with them? You're to have to deliver, but ultimately you want to give the chief product officer the, the trust that you're going to bring them.

real-time feedback from the field, you're gonna sell the products that are available, and you're gonna help bring them key insights from customers and partners on what are the things that they should be building. And we're gonna touch on that in a second, but those are really the key things, being able to sell what's available, being able to bring them trusted information about what's going on in the field, and help bring them guidance about where the market is going.

Mark Petruzzi (05:30.637)

So Mike, tell us about how you built a methodology for navigating this relationship at Salesforce. And how do you make this process kind of board ready and productive and collaborative rather than adversarial?

Mike Milburn (05:51.33)

Yeah, great question, Mark. So as a, first of all, as a backdrop, you know, I had the immense honor of being one of the guys that started Service Cloud on the founding team for Service Cloud at Salesforce. And of course, Service Cloud is now over $10 billion business inside of Salesforce. And I was there on day one when we booked the first, you know, 30 or 40K order way back in the early 2000s. So that's the framework that I'm going to use. Second is,

I think all the credit really goes to Mark and Parker, Mark Benioff and Parker Harris. They created a framework that we inherited, we modified and we enhanced. And that's what I'm going to talk about today. So the way that I think about it, Mark, is what we did in the early days of Salesforce is let's say that you had unit, I don't know, let's say you had 10 calories to burn on product.

And let's just for a moment say that all calories are equal, right? We would look at those and we would say, how many those calories are you gonna spend on new or innovation things? And how many products are you, or how many calories are you gonna spend on customer success? And so for argument's sake, let's just take 10 calories. And those calories really translate to resources or funding. But if I had 10 calories,

And I devote them all towards the front of the house or all towards sales. And that meant that I was going to create some debt on the renewal side or on the customer success side. And conversely, if I spent all 10 calories and I didn't create any new innovation, I might suffer on sales, but I would really be strong in customer success or renewals. So once you go away from the teeter totter,

And you go, well, the natural instinct is to peanut butter and to do five on each, let's say in this, in this hypothetical example. And I think what Parker really did was challenge that idea of peanut buttering and say, let's be really, really thoughtful, deliberate and challenging. And maybe you spent seven calories on sales and only three on customer success or vice versa.

Mike Milburn (08:10.134)

And let's really think about the trade-offs and let's make those data driven revenue generating success oriented decisions. And so where we took that team was we would take the product roadmap that was based off of that framework. And we would go to the sales leadership and we'd say, can you sell this? And the sales leadership would sign up to sell that. And I think, you know, that, conversation that we started with was.

can the product team create a roadmap that the sales team stands behind? And if you imagine that conversation, that's a very delicate conversation. The sales team has to take accountability for, if you're gonna go build something, then the sales team needs to be the one to stand up and say, if you build that, I'm gonna go sell it. There's always problems that come up with pricing or packaging or competition or any one of the various things that happen in the real life world, but.

The head of products job is to create a roadmap that is innovative and can support both sales and customer success, which I'm directly calling renewals, usage and adoption. So I think that was the really neat part is once we made a data driven decision, we could then look at our roadmap and say, if I remove one calories from sales, what are the sales impacts?

And what are the renewal impacts? And once you have that, the leaders of sales, success and product can all come together and they make the right decisions for the KPIs of the team. And of course that's where the CEO and the ELT come into play. But that becomes a really fun conversation when you have it, you know, when you have it laid out like that, like for this quarter or these two quarters, let's over rotate to sales. And yeah, we might create some customer success issues.

If everyone's on the same page and there's no blame game come when the, when the customers incur issues or problems, there's no finger pointing. It's we all made this decision together. And conversely, if you make a decision to go renew all your customers, then that's going to have a lot of benefits and then you might have some, some, sales friction. So it's really creating that alignment and transparency that I was really lucky to be a part of and, mature that process.

Mark Petruzzi (10:29.315)

So Mike, before we go into our next question, I'm going to open this up a little more strategically. How much did the approach that Mark drove right from the beginning of beat a mom? How much did that get into some of this? Is the methodology that you're talking about building, is it tied to beat a mom or to just kind of work in and integrate on its own along the way?

Mike Milburn (10:58.828)

Yeah, great question, Mark. So I think of the V2Mom is really a corporate operating plan. And, you know, I've got to be candid and say, think when I first joined and I was baptized in the V2Mom process, I think I wasn't quite on board with how important it was to a company. After a couple of years, I guess I would go back and restate that and say the V2Mom was one of the most important things that Salesforce has as an asset.

And it's one of the most important things that I learned. And it's one piece of advice that I've given and driven to any company that I've been lucky enough to work with is the essence of the V2Mom is a corporate operating plan that the exec team creates and they vote on together. And it decides the company's vision, values, methods, obstacles, and metrics. Essentially, what is the operating plan? And if you do it every year, then you're allowed to pivot and change at the speed of business, no matter what size company you are.

So think it's incredibly modern. The relationship between the V2Mom and the product roadmap is really simple. If the number one V2Mom is growth, and let's say growth means sales and sales is over customer success, then you should be allowed to spend more of your product calories making products that the sales team wants you to sell. If the V2Mom is customer success is number one, then

you know, voted on that by the exec team, then you might change the priorities and saying, let's spend more calories together, making products, goods and services that help renewability. So the relationship between the V2 mom, the product roadmap, the sales leadership, the success leadership is the success leadership is it's all part of the exact same formula that drives the corporate operating plan.

KK Anderson (12:56.199)

And so where like what role do you see the CEO playing out all of this kind of? Facilitating it all you know running them running the balance

Mike Milburn (13:06.606)

Yeah. So, you we were pretty lucky. We had, you know, we had the legendary Mark Benioff running on that show. And what Mark enabled us to do was he empowered us to create a forum where you're allowed to have a healthy conversation about the VT mom. And I vividly remember, I mean, so many of these meetings all kind of blur together because they were 15, 20 years ago, but I remember somebody in the company standing up and saying, I don't agree with this.

KK Anderson (13:11.558)

Yeah.

Mike Milburn (13:33.13)

Maybe the person was an individual contributor, maybe they were an influencer, but when they challenged it, was somebody in the Roman Senate saying, hey, you guys built this, I don't agree with it. And that transparency and accountability was really important. Mark drove that culture. Everyone owned the V2 Mom. Number two was you were allowed to deputize other people for your V2 Mom.

So let me make up a little hypothetical situation here. Let's say that Mark is, let's pretend that I'm the CEO, Mark's the head of sales and KK, you're the head of products. And I would say, know, is a number one priority that we sell more and everyone goes, yeah. Well, if Mark's job is the head of sales and your job is the head of product, then you inherit those priorities. And so that's where you can't be parochial or you can't be political. You've got to do the right thing.

on the V2Mom for everyone else. And it was more than a faux pas to stand up in a V2Mom meeting and be self-serving. You had to use the V2Mom as the doctrine on how you were going to operate your organization. And you were allowed to deputize other folks. Again, part of the V2Mom conversation that I didn't say earlier was it drives success in a matrix organization.

KK Anderson (15:00.006)

you

Mike Milburn (15:00.066)

There's some organizations that are more top-down, more command and control, maybe more military or more organizations. And a lot of modern organizations, you know, the CPO and the CRO might not ever report into the same person. They might be dotted lines into the CEO or they might, their peers, right? And so the V2 mom became almost navigate the V2 mom without having to go to the CEO.

KK Anderson (15:06.311)

you

Mike Milburn (15:30.124)

And when you're empowered as as a, an executive in a company to navigate that without having to go and ask permission or to have somebody navigate those rules. you tend to, you tend to come to the right decision.

KK Anderson (15:44.423)

You know, it's ironic. Mark and I are sitting here nodding our heads thinking, this is exactly what AGS needed to hear right now. Right? You know, me, every company is no matter the size, is they're navigating growth and navigating our, you know, everything. It's so important. And for the audience who's probably like Googling what is V2Mom right now, can you give an explanation of Salesforce's framework that they've made famous?

Mark Petruzzi (15:51.939)

I that guy.

Mike Milburn (15:52.11)

Thanks

Mike Milburn (15:55.841)

Really?

Mike Milburn (16:11.586)

Yep, absolutely. Okay. So it's called the V2 mom and it stands for vision values, methods, obstacles, and metrics. And so the way that I think about it is, is the vision and values or things that the exec team created and they would socialize for approval and stakeholder value with the company. So that's the first, the V2 part. The mom part is where the work gets done. The methods, obstacles, and metrics.

And so you can YouTube V2Mom. You see a lot of companies have borrowed it, but essentially there's about 10 V2Mom methods. And those could be things like say which product has a higher priority. It could mean revenue. It could mean culture. remember when, when one year when we were really going against Siebel and there was a fear that we would turn into Siebel. I think the number one method on the V2Mom was culture.

And so that trumped growth. So the M, the first M is methods. That's the kind of how, then the obstacles are what are the things that are going get in the way. And there's a one-to-one ratio between obstacles and methods. And then the measurements are how are you going to get measured on whatever method you wanted? And the, what the execs team's job was to create all the methods and then prioritize those.

And one of the really neat moments that I saw happen over and over again was a public discussion on which method is more important. And it sounds like so innocuous. It sounds so easy. But if you were to say, what's more important sales or success? That's a hard one. Cause the more you sell, the more you have to renew, the more you renew, the easier sales get and the more references you get. Which is more important, partnership growth versus

creating a brand. Geez, Salesforce has created an amazing brand. It took time to do that, which is more important. Employee success or creating a great dream force, which is more important, having a great dream force or having 10 events locally or throughout the geos. And so once you sort of create that framework to have healthy discussion, then

Mike Milburn (18:35.478)

then you kind of get everybody on the same page. So it's a corporate operating plan for the modern SaaS company.

Mark Petruzzi (18:42.711)

Yeah, and what I love about all of that, is you kind of ties me back to what you said at the beginning and that this calorie breakdown perspective that when you look at it that way, and very few companies do, right? Very few CEOs do. Most CEOs kind of come in to these QBR meetings or wherever they're addressing a team and they're like, know, sales, sales, sales, we need to grow, we need to grow.

And then they turn around and they're like, then they start talking about customer success. And they're like, well, customer success has to be perfect in this way and have to do that. But it's not. It is a zero sum game, even in a fast growing company. the process of being mature and analyzing, hey, if we want to grow a little faster,

we're going to have to do some things that are going to be a trade off on customer success. Or if we really, really need to make sure that customer success for the next couple quarters is, you know, that our retention is off the charts, then we have to slow down and accept a couple percentage points less on our growth. That doesn't happen often in companies. And I love the way you're positioning it thus far. Let's kick into topic two.

Building revenue driven product roadmaps. KK, why don't you lead us the first question there.

KK Anderson (20:11.239)

So I'm always going to start with sales because that's my passion. And so when we think about SaaS organizations and our clients, how do you ensure that sales feedback actually influences the product roadmap? That's where I think one of the greatest breakdowns is. And honestly,

It's that frontline seller who's having a lot of these conversations and the solution architects. That's the feedback that we need to go up. Right. So how do you do that?

Mike Milburn (20:45.858)

Yep.

So this is the, I'd like everybody on the podcast to kind of close your eyes and imagine this meeting. You're in a QBR, you're in your exec meeting and it's your reporting on your results for the quarter. You're getting ready for your next board meeting of any size and scope. And you're looking at, you're the CRO and you're looking at your results.

You're looking at your feature pipeline. You're looking at amount of head count and you're painting a vision for the company on where you're going to go. And what if you had a slide that, that, that said for every opportunity, here's the quantifiable problems that we're facing in the field. In other words, you know, you just kind of invoke this frontline sales and then there's,

There's RVPs and they go AVPs and by the time it gets up to the CRO, how do you get feedback? And the image that I'm trying to conjure up is, and this might sound low level, but let's start here to get to the high level. What if on every opportunity there was a way to capture objections? And it wasn't a free text field. It was a data driven format. Is it pricing? it, is it competitive? Is it a feature or function?

KK Anderson (21:48.027)

Uh-huh.

Mike Milburn (22:13.654)

And that opportunity has a dollar sign value associated to it. So if all the reps in the field were responsible for adding in all of their objections at the, at the infantry level, at the deal level, and the CRO could run a report and say, here's the number of opportunities that I'm facing where I have pricing as a problem. And here's the accumulated dollar sign that is impacted.

Or I'm facing a feature and function gap, or I'm facing a critical piece of functionality that will require &A. Whatever it is, if you can associate deal friction with the number of deals and the amount of ARR or the amount of revenue that's associated, now you're having an exact conversation. It's not emotional. You're saying I've got X number of dollars. I'm going to choose 50 million or 5 million or 5

KK Anderson (23:05.991)

Mm-hmm.

Mike Milburn (23:11.074)

beans, whatever vector you want. And here is the data behind it that is causing me friction. Then the product organization or the partner organization or any other organization, they can ask you questions about it. They can second guess the quality of the data or what some of it means, but it's really hard to have. It's really easy to have a great conversation. If you come to that meeting with, Hey guys, our second half pipeline.

or X amount of revenue. And here are the three biggest blockers we're having to make the second half of the year. We need a flex capacitor. We need more aggressive POC pricing. And we'd really like exec sponsorship on the following 10 deals because we're having a lot of competitive pressure. Now it becomes a fulfillment opportunity for the rest of exec team to rally behind you instead of that familiar pattern of

what's happening with the deals and could have, should have, would have kind of that soft squishy. If the CRO can bring concrete examples of what they need to that meeting, then you're getting this CPO on board with you to build the right things to deliver more revenue.

Mark Petruzzi (24:30.253)

really good points there, Mike. So, okay, so how do you do, know, companies are getting customer requests, customer feedback every minute of every day. How do you determine, just how do you accept that into the process? How do you get that data into your system first? And then...

What are the criteria that should help you really drive and make it affect product decisions that will move revenue versus what may make one client feel good or even what may make the company feel good? Like we may look at this and say, yeah, this is an important one. This is important. But at end of the day, if it's not going to move revenue, it's got to be in a different place in that product roadmap.

How have you done such a great job with that throughout your entire career?

Mike Milburn (25:28.664)

You try and make the process easy, Mark. You try and make it transparent and you try to remove some of the black box. First of all, you know, the, the axiom of feedback as a gift is, is not just true if you're not getting feedback, like you're doing something very, very wrong. So let's just start with the sales side. Do you have a system that can quantify from the SEs and the sales team, the blockers that are getting in the way to sell the deal?

Do you have that? That is a binary yes or no question. And then can you summarize that by segment or geo? So part of what you implied by that question is if I have a sales team that's selling an SMB in North America and an enterprise team that is selling in Europe and they're asking for things, how do you distill those two things into a criteria?

that creates action? And the simple answer is revenue. So let's just make up some, let's just make up something to talk about. Let's say your SMB team has 20 deals, each valued at $1. Right? And that's in North America, that's $20. But your EMEA team, it wants something that is $100, but there's only one deal.

And you look at everyone and let's assume that to build those two products is the same amount of calories. Cause when you get different calories, then all of a sudden you're invoking a different vector. But first of all, can you have that conversation? This is no different than having a conversation with your family about where to go on vacation. Do you go on two little vacations and for a couple of days, you'd be on one big vacation. The world's navigated that for a long time, but now all of a sudden the sales conversation is difficult with your product team.

As a CRO, can you articulate the number of deals by segment and exactly what the blockers are? Yes or no. If you do not have that mechanism in place, then I would encourage you to use a CRM like Salesforce to create those objects. And you simply, it's part of your sales operations criteria. Every deal gets a blockers or pathways and it's not a free text.

Mike Milburn (27:49.12)

It is the top lockers and you're able to, sales ops can help you navigate, and, and run those reports. So that's the first side of it. Then, then the second side of it is as an exec team, do you have the framework to be able to decide and have that conversation? I think this is where a lot of these conversations stall is the fear that you have been building the wrong things or, or are you listening in the right way? Maybe.

You know, I just said it in a very blunt way, but if you're going to get to transparency, you've got to be able to listen and then you've got to be able to make roadmap decisions based off it. So, you know, I would say, regardless of what's happened in the past from the product and sales organizations, this is your opportunity to reset. Listen to what the sales team is telling you and then build a roadmap that addresses those. And if you're not going to address it, then just like, just like we talked about earlier, say.

we're gonna make these other decisions. And if you keep seeing this deal friction, we're sympathizing with you and we're not ignoring it. On the reverse side, on the customer success side, it's anyone that's a customer needs to be able to submit the feedback into your organization to tell you what is causing them to stop or renewal. And part of the unspoken hard part here is time.

A product roadmap usually takes a year to effect, which ironically is why Salesforce's roadmap is three RR was three RR three releases a year. So if you're going to get something into the roadmap, it might take you three releases to get that through the system. So you've got to have your radar out both on the sales and server sales and success side long enough to listen and impact that roadmap. The, so that's the time vector then.

That's all systematic and programmatic. And again, you should be able to report that to the CEO. You should be able to report that to the board. Then you have the live functions. And so this is actually a really neat story, but if you were to go on YouTube and you go true to the core, one of the most profound sessions that occurred, that occurs every dream force is usually it's Parker led, but somebody on the product team gets up.

Mike Milburn (30:14.578)

And the audience can range from five to 10,000 people. And they lead a conversation of, we being authentic with our roadmap? And this is a really neat conversation because there is no sales team. There's no success team. It's just the customer and Salesforce on stage. And what Parker does a great job of it is navigating. Every customer is going to have wants and needs. Everyone's got their individual requirements, et cetera.

And those fit either in, no, we're not going to do that. It's the wrong thing for us to build. We're thinking about it or here's where it's going to be built. And over time, what I think is really neat about true to the core is it shows Salesforce commitment to listening. It shows the customer's commitment towards giving that feedback. And I don't have any data or stats on it, but I would guess that, you know,

The reason why, the reason why that's so effective is the customers feel that their voice matters. And so if you combine both those things and you have sales radar and sales intelligence telling you what is necessary to drive a sale. And then you have customer intelligence coming through and saying, what do you intend to build?

And then you have something like true to the core, it could be exec round tables, or it could be dinners or whatever mechanism the company feels comfortable. Dreamforce is a very unique opportunity. What you see there is sort of like checks and balances, sort of like the foundation of the United States, right? We've got three different, bodies that help govern the United States. You have the sales team giving you feedback, the success team giving you feedback, and then you have actual customers. You take all three of those pieces of feedback and you look at the roadmap and you should be able to say.

KK Anderson (31:51.495)

with customers.

Mike Milburn (31:56.096)

Am I building the right things together?

KK Anderson (31:59.463)

And I wonder how often what the customer says is different in fact than the others

Mike Milburn (32:06.338)

You know, it happens. mean, I remember some very contentious, true to the core sessions and you kind of have to be candid and say, is this the right thing for the company to build? mean, the more customers you get, the more the need, do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the needs of the individual. Also here is the difference between like core product and customizable. So it's one thing for customer to say, I want this turnkey.

KK Anderson (32:28.977)

Mm-hmm.

Mike Milburn (32:32.918)

It's another thing to say you could do this and here's how you would do that. My opinion is that customers want transparency. And just because a customer wants something doesn't mean they should build it, but they deserve to be, they deserve to be heard.

KK Anderson (32:47.894)

I have a question. Just real quick, Mark, if I could, you talk about the three releases a year and that's... It feels like nowadays, that's just... Everyone wants something in the moment. They want real time. They want changes faster. want... I mean, I know it's not really a part of this topic per se, but I guess it kind of is. It's product roadmap and it's more...

Mark Petruzzi (32:48.724)

You know what's in...

KK Anderson (33:15.215)

in a real time, faster environment? Like how is the speed of business changing how SaaS companies are releasing and updating?

Mike Milburn (33:27.234)

Yeah. So this is a great topic. mean, I think we pioneered three releases a day, you know, almost 20 years ago. I guess the way I think about what Salesforce did with 3RR was it gave you some ability to have certainty to what is coming next, what you believe is coming, and then what you believe is coming a little bit longer out. So you sort of know directionally what's happening and it was transparent.

The, I felt that same anxiety many times of customers like, want this today and I want it today. I think that's tempered or weathered with building in the right way, building trust, building safety, building security. Some things take more than a day or a week or a month to build. The important thing is that does the company know where, does the customer know where you stand as an organization? Are you being heard?

And are you delivering on it? So, you know, we, I personally felt after, after being so many, after being so many, ABCs, executive briefing sessions or customer sessions or dream forces that the customer's desire to have it today is that was less important than Salesforce being able to listen and being able to build the right data driven machinery.

It also worked where if a customer said, I want X and nobody had ever heard it, you could tell the customer, you know what? You're the only customer that we've ever heard that's asked for this. And that worked in our favor a lot of times too. So if you speed that up today and people want, know, just in time releases or they want a release every two days, I don't think it changes the equation too much. Can you quantify what is being necessary in order to sell more products?

Can you quantify what is being used to renew more products? And if you can deliver it on a frequency of three times a year, five times a year, once a month, once a day, that's great. But I don't think it changes the overall calculus of, you listening to your sales team? Are you listening to your success team? Are you listening to your renewals team? are you, Ergo, you listening to your customers?

Mark Petruzzi (35:49.348)

Excellent. All right, let's go to our third topic here and go to market execution and when product and sales teams move as one. Tell us a little bit about what world class looks like around product, sales, execution. And when we use that term move as one, I've heard you use that term and that's why I'm asking it.

What does it mean for product and sales to move as one?

Mike Milburn (36:19.788)

Yeah. So.

Mike Milburn (36:24.5)

One of the great parts that I remember about our internal QBRs at Salesforce was having the sales team kick off or the sales team wrap up one of my product conversations. And imagine your CRO standing up and saying, I'm not the chief product officer.

Or I'm not heading up product, but I'm excited about the roadmap and here's why I'm excited. I'm going to go sell this because I believe in it. Now, all of a sudden you're showing alignment with your, with your critical sales component. And I think a lot of the internal meetings turn into sales is the sales job. Product is the product job and everyone just kind of goes off into their silos. So it starts with that message. Does the head of sales.

Can they deliver the product roadmap? Can the head of sales demo the product? And this is something that I just find really, really unique and interesting, but I mean, I think it's still the case today that almost every executive at Salesforce is responsible for demoing their product. And there's products that it doesn't make sense and there's really technical and I'm sure we can find corner cases, but it's pretty powerful when the head of sales is able to...

KK Anderson (37:18.897)

Alright.

Mike Milburn (37:43.064)

demo in some capacity, even if it's not the world's greatest demo. So I think those two things are one and two. Three is almost no airspace between the roadmap and the sales team. We've touched on it all throughout this conversation, Mark, but you should never ever hear from any sales team. man, I wish our roadmap was different. And I think you hear a lot of that kind of in the background or hallway conversations or exit interviews or.

Maybe I'm linked in. Sometimes you hear a lot of that. And conversely, from the product team, selling is hard. And so when you involve the product team in selling and you start to see the art of selling and the science of selling, you're going to see a lot of of sympathies and a lot of energies, know, timely today. Just today, I saw.

a CRO for one of the companies I led, he left one company and went to a new company. And when you see the product team respond to that and saying, you're going to do great, John, keep going, we loved working with you. I think that's the job of a CRO is to build those relationships that maybe said a different way. If a CRO is interviewing for their next job,

Why wouldn't the chief product officer be one of their key endorse ease or endorsements? That would be a true testimony.

KK Anderson (39:12.455)

Yeah, it really would. And, you know, take the CMO, the CPO and everybody. what's your, we have recently recorded a podcast with Kathy Minter and she talked a lot about the concept of the unified CRO and having sort of one leader that is overseeing marketing, overseeing product, overseeing customer success and in that way, rather than.

know, silent. What are your thoughts around that? Some of what you just said had me thinking.

Mike Milburn (39:48.364)

Yeah, I think there's some really exciting, I think there's been some, I think there's really exciting new roles that have been created both from CEOs and CROs, you know, and I think the CRO that is just revenue generating or just sales generating, think, I mean, first of all, it's an incredible job with a lot of responsibility and a lot of accountability.

But the inputs for that are things like marketing and branding, top of the funnel, the creation of pipeline. So if we're able to understand and navigate brand and marketing, then that's almost a next generation CRO leader. Same thing with system engineering. I've seen customer success fall in there. So it really depends on kind of the company and the investors and kind of the...

Also the candidate and the kind of role behind it. mean, at Salesforce, if you look at the current organization, it would be really bad form if you were a sales leader and you couldn't articulate the product or you couldn't articulate the message. Salesforce is lucky. 25 years later, everyone's on brand, everyone's on message. They have the enablement departments to go through that. So I think part of what you're asking, KK, is like you have

You have smaller companies, medium companies, bigger companies. You have all these different sizes of companies. Then you have private equity investors. And I think this is also an important point that, you know, in the in kind of the previous model, when companies were publicly traded or that was your goal is to IPO and be publicly traded company. Who was your accountable? Who is your accountable stakeholder? Wall Street, the stock price, right?

Now with private equity, they have a different set of goals, a different set of goals and a different timeframe for that. So what is the organizational structure that's going to drive value creation? And so I think you're seeing some consolidation in some of those roles, which is really exciting.

Mark Petruzzi (41:59.556)

And Mike, think you just set up our next podcast together and I don't think we've ever brought you by me back super fast, even though we've had amazing guests along the way. But I think we have to have a discussion after this about getting you back in in the next few weeks and talking and going more deeply into that private equity, private equity and sales, private equity and how that affects strategy within.

All these companies that you work with and and we do KK myself as well Yes, we're running lower on time here, but I'd like to get into topic for scaling product sales alignment frameworks for high growth organizations and I think the the core item here is when you when you scale from early stage startup to enterprise

How does this product sales relationship need to evolve? And how do you make that work? Because we all know these early stage companies of today are going to be the sales force of 2030. So, or at least a couple of them are. Not many, but a couple. And how do you navigate in each environment to get to that full scalability?

Mike Milburn (43:24.096)

Yeah, great question, Mark. you know, with all the turnover, all the growth and all the pace and speed that the tech ecosystem is in, here's a couple pieces of guidance. if you're the CRO and there was an impromptu board meeting, could you articulate the product roadmap and give your editorial and a data-driven decision on why it's good or conversely why it's bad?

Not subjective, not your opinion, but can you give a data-driven, supportable articulation of the product roadmap that, you know, that can you articulate that? That's thing one. Thing two is, are you listening to the customers in your, again, your sales teams are spending all of their time with customers. Are you bringing the product organization

critical information about the customers buying decisions, their needs, their wants, and are you giving, are you helping another organization build the right roadmap? Number three is, have you done, here's a litmus test one. Have you done a product tour with your top customers and your CPO? Nothing will flush out a correct alignment.

or an incorrect alignment better than a dinner or lunch or breakfast with 10 customers, head of sales and the head of product. There's nowhere to go. The door shuts. They start asking questions. What about this? How does this work? Can you have you done that before? And so I think those are three things. If I had to invoke a fourth one, it would be imagine your board meeting and reverse it.

Imagine presenting to either your private equity investors or the public counsel and imagine talking about the product roadmap and your alignment with your CPO. That's, think, what your job is as CRO is to build that alignment and build that trust.

KK Anderson (45:30.449)

So when you were in the beginnings of Service Cloud and you were there with a front row seat, what, any stories come to mind around how that scale and what that experience was like?

Mike Milburn (45:40.268)

Yeah. I think I shared this earlier. The first meeting I had when I was the GM, was terrified. I thought I was responsible for innovation and I had to figure out all this stuff. I was very, very intimidated by that opportunity. Parker leaned over and he made it just real normal. goes, just listen to what they say. Just listen.

And I listened to the sales team talk about, you know, here's the size of the opportunities. Here's the data coming. Here's the telemetry coming out of sales. And then I listened to the telemetry coming out of success. And the picture that came out of that was maybe it was 80%. Right. It was let's build this to drive more sales. Let's build this to build, to help do success. And I didn't have enough calories to, to, to do everything. So then I asked for help and it was, peer group.

How would you slice this? Would you do 80, 20, 20, 80, 50, 50, 70, 30? And I navigated that success together. And eventually it was the head of sales who became incredibly supportive of my roadmap in service cloud, which led to growth. And so the head of sales became one of our biggest advocates. so I think that story, KK, kind of, you know, while it was...

very, very intimidating and I had a of anxiety going to that meeting. It's sort of, reflect on that and Parker was exactly right. If you listen to what the sales team is providing in data driven organization, then the roadmap becomes almost a fulfillment exercise of how are you going to deliver that in the shortest amount of time? And the innovation is going to come from your product and engineering organizations on how you're going to fulfill the most amount of those things in the shortest amount of time.

Mark Petruzzi (47:35.232)

Excellent. All right, let's jump into our rapid fire segment here because I can't wait to hear some of these here from your perspective. So, you you're not a CRO. know, that's not kind of not your core, even though you've done so many amazing things over your career. So I guess this question becomes, you know, when in your career have you been asked to sell and what what product or service

was the first one you've ever really got your hands around.

Mike Milburn (48:09.506)

Yeah. So I've carried a bag. Actually, Mark, I've been responsible. I've never carried a bag from an AE perspective, but I've been responsible for revenue four or five times in my career. And believe it or not, the first is going back to Salesforce. At a matrix organization, I had no salespeople reporting to me and I had all the accountability of revenue. So I had to stand up in front of Mark and team and the board and, and, and, and announce that. So.

That was really the first one. And then every company since then, I've had some relationship, either direct or indirect, with the ownership of revenue.

KK Anderson (48:50.983)

Okay, who is your favorite, let's say CEO or C-level business mentor to follow?

Mike Milburn (48:59.34)

Yeah. So I think, so first of all, I keep an internal board of directors. And for me, what my internal board and my internal mentor do is, is they allow me to be accountable to people that I value. And one of the sales leaders that was at Salesforce, that was running one third of the company for a large majority of that time was a gentleman named Dan Del Degan, affectionately known as Triple D.

And, Dan came out of Oracle and then was it hugely influential in the growth of Salesforce. Dan later on, joined Greg Buchholz, the founder and CEO of Spring CM and Dan became the president and they sold Spring to DocuSign. Dan is probably the, gentleman that I count as my chairman of my board to, to hold myself accountable, but

I think the way that he operates in his value systems, a sales oriented to the topic of this conversation, a sales oriented CEO, I count Dan the top of that list.

Mark Petruzzi (50:03.203)

Excellent. So yeah, what about a tool that every product leader, well, let's do two of them here. Since you've managed these in a dotted line way, you're responsible for this revenue, you get to see the good, bad, and the ugly, and you get to see it from a slightly different vantage point than if you were.

a CRO managing that team day to day, which I think is going to give you even better insights to these questions. So what tool would you recommend every sales leader use to ensure they are aligned with the organization? And then is it any different for a product leader, any different recommendations there as well?

Mike Milburn (50:48.578)

Yeah. So I had the, I had the opportunity to build these tools. actually the first company I left after Salesforce was Salsify and we built both of these tools natively mark. chose Salesforce for those things. as a, as a platform, on the, on the sales side, think building the data model to be able to support what is sales need. I think it makes sense to build natively on Salesforce. It's close to the opportunity. It's close to.

leads opportunities, close one, time in sales stage, all of that makes it very, very simple. On the reverse side, it's really about usage and adoption. So, you know, there's a number of enterprise tools. I don't think I'm wedded. don't have a favorite, but what I want to know as CPO is who's using the products and what does usage and adoption look like?

from a telemetry standpoint on a good customer and what does it look like on a bad customer? So I almost think about like, I want the customer's name redacted and I wanna see usage and adoption and I wanna see those trends and I wanna see what's working and what's not working. Then I wanna start asking questions. So every product has got their own internal telemetry tools.

I'm not wedded to any of them, but I really believe in usage and adoption to drive the customer success product roadmap.

KK Anderson (52:23.079)

Nice. Okay Mike, what advice would you give your 21 year old self?

Mike Milburn (52:30.95)

I would give the advice that if I could imagine the number one relationship to build, would be the relationship between sales and products and never ever have a conversation that sounded or looked parochial about. wish sales did something different. I wish services did something different. I think there's a wonderful skill of empathy. And if you're a product person and empathize how hard it is to carry a bag and you're

family's livelihood is dependent on you selling something in some frequency, and you reverse that from a sales position, understand how hard it is to ship and QA and deliver products. I think it's the empathy between sales and service, sales and product, I think is just something I wish I'd spent more time on earlier in my career.

Mark Petruzzi (53:19.649)

I mean, Mike, isn't it just the kind of the secrets of life, you know, having that that empathy in every situation and anybody you work with or coordinate with from a business or personal perspective. So I love the way you just described that. All right, let's close up on.

Let's just say this from a product manager, a product manager perspective, somebody who is the CPO taking that role for the first time. Are there any books that can give a little bit of the tricks in the trade that you've read or do you just need to get the work and write that so we all have that insight?

Mike Milburn (54:01.41)

You know, it's a great question. The one that comes to mind is actually Mark's first book. I think it was Behind the Cloud. And it just boils it down into such, from what I remember, it's been a couple of years since I read it, Mark, but it just boils it down into the raw distilling of what it takes to create a product and get people to sell it, use it, and adopt it. And, you know, in those early days, in the first five to 10 years of Salesforce,

We did so much evangelizing, so much listening, but there was so much passion behind it. And so I think that's probably a pretty good place to start.

Mark Petruzzi (54:39.615)

Excellent. Well, we have kept you a minute more than we asked so we want to keep you on schedule for your day But Mike, this is such an honor. It was so great to to dive deep into some of these subjects with you So great that I feel like we should do it again, but we'll figure that one out from here

KK Anderson (54:56.423)

Thank

Mike Milburn (54:58.36)

Sounds good, guys. We'll talk to you soon. Great to be here. Cheers. Bye-bye.

KK Anderson (55:00.313)

Thanks Mike.

Mark Petruzzi (55:00.727)

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.

This special episode kicks off our Mastering Sales with AI series with a candid, high-impact discussion on how revenue leaders can move beyond AI buzzwords and actually apply intelligent selling strategies—especially in volatile markets.

Stephen Messer and Paul Melchiorre join Mark Petruzzi to break down the hard truths about what makes AI work in real sales orgs: leadership alignment, data readiness, and daily execution. This is your first step toward modern, adaptive selling—driven by signal, not guesswork.

What You’ll Learn:

• Execution Beats Ambition: Why success with AI doesn’t start with big vision decks—but with specific, high-impact use cases.
• Your CRM Can’t Keep Up: Why traditional tools break in volatile markets, and how neural net AI models adjust in real time.
• Forecasting Needs a Reboot: How daily deal signals—red, yellow, green—are replacing “gut feel” and weekly sales meetings.
• Buyer-Centric Strategy: Why studying sellers won’t help you predict revenue—but studying buyers will.
• Leading with Insight: How top CROs gain board trust through data, not opinions.

Key Topics:

• Moving from AI theory to operational reality
• Fixing broken forecasting processes
• Leveraging volatility as a growth advantage
• Redefining enablement with signal-based coaching
• Why AI is a co-pilot, not a replacement
• How to scale insights across sellers, teams, and time zones
• 
  

Event Recap – Top Takeaways:

• Start small, win big: Tie AI to real revenue use cases.
• Clean data wins: No insights without data discipline.
• AI empowers, not replaces: Give time back to sellers, and sharpen execution.
• Execution > tools: Adoption follows alignment.

🎧 Listen now and follow Selling the Cloud for more episodes in our Mastering Sales with AI series. New sessions coming soon.

Mark Petruzzi (00:39)

Welcome to this special edition of the Selling the Cloud podcast. Today we're digging in one of the most pressing questions facing revenue teams right now, today. How do you sell and lead when the market gets shaky? We're thrilled to be joined again by our friend and Selling the Cloud regular, Stephen Messer, co-founder of Collective Eye. Stephen is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and one of the most innovative thinkers

when it comes to applying AI to real world business challenges. With Collective Eye, he's created a platform that brings predictive sales intelligence, once reserved for Fortune 500 companies, into the hand of every seller and sales leader in companies of all sizes. As economic uncertainty rises, many organizations instinctively pull back, but strong sellers and smart leaders lean in. Collective Eye helps them do that with confidence.

providing real-time insight into which deals are likely to close, where risk exists, and how to act before it's too late. In today's episode, we're gonna dive deep into three key topics. Why volatility separates strong sellers from the rest, and how leaders can help their team step up. Why traditional forecasting tools break in a shifting market, and how AI gives you the edge.

and then how to create urgency when customers are tempted to delay and how to guide them to take action. Okay, let's jump in. Stephen, welcome back to Selling the Cloud.

Stephen Messer (02:17)

I love being here. Thank you, Mark. Thank you, KK, for having me. You know I love talking to your audience and frankly just talking to you too.

Mark Petruzzi (02:24)

We love it too.

KK (02:24)

⁓ that is

awesome. We're so happy to have you, Stephen. So let's dive into the first topic, which is how volatility reveals the real sellers. Like, will the real sellers please stand up? And so right now, one of the things that we're seeing across, you know, so many of our clients is hesitation, right? And it's exposing when deals stall and push and delay, it's really exposing sellers

who have relied historically on tailwinds or relied on having a ⁓ well-known logo that they're selling for. And strong sellers, right, they're typically going to thrive in this kind of environment because they're truly meeting the needs and the outcomes of the customer. So what, like in this, just kind of backing up a little bit and thinking about how you sell in volatile times, like what,

What do you see or what do you think top performers are doing differently than them?

Stephen Messer (03:29)

Yeah, well,

let's talk about top performers, top organizations, because remember market share is always hard to get in any market. But when there's change, that's usually when markets shift pretty dynamically. And volatility is something that a lot of organizations are sitting today looking around and realizing that they and their architectures are very rigid. They're not very flexible to make change.

They're also not getting feedback loops fast enough. And that translates from leadership down to seller. So I say that because, you know, historically we're well, let's put it this way, market volatility, especially when it's external volatility can be very hard to understand. You're asking an individual seller to figure out what's going on or the organization is coming to a group think mentality. And the reason why that's so challenging is because they're using themselves.

to try to figure out what's going to change in the world. I think there's nothing harder, right? One, your assumption is it's you. And then the second thing is your assumption is somehow the group think will get us there fast enough. But I think what you've heard me say this before, which is the hardest part about listening to your customer in a high volatility, especially when it's negative market impacts, which is really what we're living through.

right now is sort of these shocks to the market that keep coming every other day. And that makes it very hard. What you're hearing from your customer and what their conversations are with you aren't going to help you. They're giving you sort of the Instagram view of the world. And I always joke, the happiest couples look on Instagram in the two months prior to their divorce. They're out there telling you what a great thing is. And I think when market challenges arise,

A lot of your customers are afraid to say we're hitting headwinds in our market. That's why we may not be buying and or other things that are going on because they're not sure if it's just them or if it's everyone else and nobody wants to look like they're in trouble because that creates a death spiral and all these other things around it. So what I think I'll highlight is you are talking about the sellers who are able to pick up on those subtle signals or are testing and trying messages almost immediately to test for what's really happening.

as opposed to playbook people, or as opposed to people who are just trying to follow the med pic steps. They recognize that as soon as the market changes, I have to start figuring out and sensing what's going on in the market. I think that is one of the more important things to do. But I think I wanted to bring back, because everyone thinks, no, ⁓ it has to do with an individual. So I think it's the whole work fixating on themselves, not trying to understand what the entire market's telling them.

and the best people know how to do that.

KK (06:24)

Really interesting. ⁓ So what if we think about the end-door performers? Like how do, like the ones who aren't pushing and asking the right questions, like how do we, like if I'm a sales leader, is kind of what I'm getting at. If I'm a sales leader and I've got a sales team, I'm gonna have some strong sellers and medium sellers, probably some low sellers. How do I know?

How do I know when the times get volatile like this, like who's doing what needs to be done? Like how do I know what's real, what's not, who has happy ears? What do I look for?

Stephen Messer (06:51)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Look, Warren Buffett always said it best when the tide goes out is only when you see who's naked. And I think what a lot of the sales organization is going to experience is that a lot of the people that they liked the most in sales were the people who followed their playbooks, were there people who followed the steps exactly. They may, they're probably never the top producers, but they liked it. And what's happening now is

the market has shifted and all those playbooks fail. Always, inevitably. They're doing yesterday's messages, yesterday's sale, yesterday's behavior. And by the way, all their systems are looking at, especially if they're using the older form of AI called machine learning, they're probably looking at the last two years to predict what's going on today. Nothing to do with what today is. So all their systems are falling apart.

There's probably a few outliers that are their best sellers and historically been their best sellers, but never listened to anyone, never cared, never paid attention. Those are the players that are best. And I bring that up because those are the players who are just going about doing their job of selling. But the top producers are on their own. All the systems that you're looking at that people have installed.

you know, unless they're neural net, they're not adjusting daily to what's going on. So they're all their entire systems are falling apart. Can I, can I give an explanation of what I mean by that? All right. I want you to imagine that if you pick the technology, the older workflow technologies, you know, for forecasting, for deal review, for conversational intelligence, whatever you're looking at, they're all looking at just your company's data.

Mark Petruzzi (08:35)

Yes, please.

Stephen Messer (08:53)

for the last two years and using machine learning to look for the average. called, it's a regression model. They're looking at what's the average. So they're trying to figure out whatever worked over the last two years is going to be assigned for what works today. That is a real problem. And I'll give an analogy to try to make it easy. I want you to imagine a plane where all your gauges will work fine so long as the plane is working perfectly.

But if an engine catches on fire, something that hasn't happened in the last two years, all your gauges break. Now, I want to be clear. The only time you needed the gauges was when the emergency came up. But they're all designed to break the minute there's something new or unusual that occurs. So if you are using the most common tools that are out there, I'm not going to name their names.

Cadence tools, forecasting tools, et cetera. And they're not like Collective Eye where we're using entire networks in a neural net. What's happening is they're not adjusting to the change. Everything just looks like it's broken and you can't figure out what's going on. So you've lost all your tooling to understand daily change. think of this. Most people are still doing weekly forecasting. Or they're figuring out that deals don't work at the end of a quarter.

So when you're having volatility, think about what's happened in the last five days, ⁓ Tariffs on, tariffs off, tariffs doubled ⁓ to China. Then it was the Federal Reserve Chief is gonna get fired, then he's getting saved. I mean, I can go through the dailyness. And by the way, this is like the first 120 days. Like, this is like not minor stuff. And everyone's trying to look at their tooling to get a sense of what's happening with their deals.

And that tooling is using the last two years that had none of this to decide what's going on. I think that's terrifying. If I'm them, you're flying without gauges in fog. You are literally trying to hope for, does anyone see anything? Does anyone hear anything? I don't know how you do it. And this is a good warning. We're shot over the bow that if you don't have, in our world we call it collective, which is obviously our name.

Which is if an AI like a neural net, these newer types of AI aren't learning from everything going on, you are literally trying to ask the people in your org to figure out from a limited amount of data what's actually happening on a macro level. I think that's crazy.

Mark Petruzzi (11:31)

Yeah. And it's especially crazy, Steven, when we're also in the midst of software and SaaS, software as a service, being entirely different in the world than ⁓ AI. So maybe we can touch a little bit there and maybe tie it back to how the sales leaders leverage the new tools to leverage and figure out who their highest performing reps.

Stephen Messer (11:43)

displaced. Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (12:01)

and highest potential reps are going to be in this new environment and in this new technology space as well.

Stephen Messer (12:09)

Yeah. Look, ⁓ I think in these times, there's two types of leaders. There's the back to basics leaders. All right. These are the guys where they're like, my God, we're going through this, but I've experienced other problems in the past. So I'm going to follow my old, wait, look, I just really need people to hunker down and do this thing. Now that's kind of like when Walmart started getting hit by Amazon and

I could see Walmart executives being like, it has nothing to do with online shopping. What it has to do is we have to get back to better greeters. If we could just do the basics really well, then people come in, people love greeters. You can't do that online. Like you could see this kind of logic. Back to basics, people don't realize that the world is the paradigm has completely shifted. And now again, I wouldn't say this if it wasn't for we're in the midst of this AI revolution where everyone's doing these things. Cause if you had traditional tools and a market collapse, fine.

That may be what you do is back to basics. But in the midst of a market change, what happens is people retool everything when they realize there's a better way to handle a downturn like this. This is what happened. If you think about the dot com collapse, everyone shifted over to digital marketing. We came out of the dot com collapse and more companies had web presences, more companies had.

Uh, online shopping more companies had shifted their advertising from traditional things like television, radio, and newspapers to online. Like the entire world shifted. switched to Google, like everything moved because there was a better approach. Well, let me tell you, there is another kind of manager that looks and says, okay, everything is changing. How do I now adjust to it and what else, what is going to happen? And if you think about the AI first sales organization, we are not talking about people who are thinking weekly cadences.

Right, you've seen this Mark. Daily optimization means you're adjusting to what's happening to your customer, but you're starting with studying your customer. That's what these models do. Like in our model, our customers, we track 5 % of the globe's economy is feeding this model. That's all feeding back everyone a daily view. You know what that's going to happen to your customer before they've told you just cause you're getting feedback loops.

Mark Petruzzi (14:17)

Yeah.

And the old traditional approaches of this, that your competitors, they're just looking at what happened two years ago and what's happening in that company. There is nothing about the buyer and the buyer's journey and what's happening on that side and what the thought process is. And that's where these AI tools that are especially yours being built in a collective fashion

You're getting perspectives and guidance and coaching from your buyers as well. It's not just coming from you or your team because by their actions, your buyers are coaching you on what you should be doing next.

Stephen Messer (14:51)

Yeah.

Look, think about it this way. You are literally, it's April 23rd. For most of the SaaS world, this will be the end of their fiscal year in a few days. And I'm going to bet you that there are a whole bunch of leaders out there who are freaking out because they're going to rely on the last day or the last few days to try to figure out what's actually coming in. And they're relying on quantifying the opinion.

of all their reps of what's going to happen as the world is changing. I, as someone who's out there, can't tell you. I can watch all the news in the world. I still don't know what it's going to mean. But my neural net knows exactly what it's going to mean. I can start to see which deals that I thought were good are starting to go red. Because I promise you, if they're a manufacturing org, or they sell to manufacturing orgs, or they're dealing with people who have to import products, their world is changing. But I bet you there's a lot of people you didn't think were going to have downsides that are now.

having downsides or reconsidering purchases because they just want to wait and see. And I bet you nobody's paying attention to that because they think I'm going to get this deal over the finish line. I'm going to have to do a little bit more discounting, but I'm going to get it there. And I think they're going to find out discounting is not the problem.

KK (16:11)

It's not a race to the bottom this time. And so a couple of things that I'm thinking about as I listen. So one, it feels like the last decade, the theme de jour before the AI revolution really was process. Write your sales process, document your process, have everyone doing the same thing. And then we've got all of these systems that allow like

very generic, know, spray and pray is what we call it, know, cadences and, and outreaches and everyone, you know, it was all around activity and process and not really necessarily the right activity or even the right process. Right. And so now with volatility, right, that, that you don't want your sellers like the blind leading the blind, right? You don't want to be like an ostrich with your head in the sand while the

you know, with happy ears, right? That's something that I keep thinking about a lot. so a sales leader needs to be agile and they need to be able to like move on a dime and bag some of the stuff that they've been doing that is actually causing them to go slower. Like what's your thought on that?

Stephen Messer (17:31)

Look, this is the terrifying thing of what's happening when you have these grounds swells where everything changes, these paradigm shifts that hit. People are really afraid. used to call it in my last company, we used to call it the Tarzan syndrome, where they're afraid to let go of the rope that they're holding onto until they firmly feel they understand the new one. But you never really hold onto the new rope if you're holding onto the old one so tightly, you're just never gonna let go. And what you saw during the dot com change,

really when that switched over is you saw changing of the guards. There were some people who just wouldn't let go of the rope. And there are other people who like, this is a time we have to change everything. And I fear that, you you brought it up first. I have heard crazy things like forecasting is a process. Well, if forecasting was a process, Goldman Sachs would have the ultimate process. They don't. They recognize that volatility is the norm. Like this is what neural nets are great for. If you have a large enough data set, we've spent 10 years.

tracking the globe's economy, building this model to do this stuff. This stuff can change the way you think about things. I've also heard people tell me how buyer centric they are while only studying their seller. like, there's like, there's a point where you have a realization. Life makes things hard to make it easy for you to change. Not everyone gets that message. Sometimes they think hard is what you have to work through.

Mark Petruzzi (18:41)

you

Stephen Messer (18:56)

No, I would say if you're sitting there today, if you are watching this and you were wondering, am I going to make my end of fiscal year? Because you are sitting there worried. You have put in place all the wrong systems. You think it works because it worked for 10 years and you are mistaking that what works in the past will work in the future. That is like saying, I'm going to give them all my salespeople quarters to call me from the road because cell phones don't exist.

So I'm not going to think about my Salesforce as having a computer in their pocket because now it's a smartphone. Like you change with the times. And if you're using something you bought five years ago, you are using an infrastructure that makes no sense for the modern world. You just haven't gotten there yet. So KK, you are right. I will tell you what the new sales org looks like. And you know it because it's your best sellers are already doing this. One, it is one to one selling. If you are doing mass marketing,

Cadence tools, auto dialers, SDRs, I will tell you that is going the way of the Dodo. You can call it a cadence, I promise you your customer's calling it spam. And I know that, and you know that, because when you get it from other people, you think to yourself, my God, I can't believe they sent me this message. I will tell you a few more things that they already know. They're not answering their phones anymore.

They're not like these are heads of sales who won't do the stuff that they're telling people to do bombard people. No buyers want you to know them. So why do I bring that up? If you had a daily feedback loop and you guys know this more than anyone else when you see a deal go in the odds change and go down you change your pitch to adjust to what's happening in the market. I'll tell you we sell volatility now. If you are worried about volatility that is why you need daily forecasting with traditional process forecasting as an example.

You're going to get a weekly forecast based on people's opinions. I need to know what the world is telling me daily. That, that is the message we didn't sell prior to 90 or 120 days ago. It's a feature of our product. You all have features of your products and services. You're figuring out which features of your products matter more. But if you can't recognize that the old pitch isn't working or not working for this buyer at this company in this region on this day, if you're not getting a daily feedback,

You're not going to, you're going to try one, two messages. Yeah, maybe good luck. hope that's enough. Ours we're trying six, seven, eight, nine, 10 different messages with different people. And we all collaborate so we can share which messages worked in which scenarios. And we're sharing that across our whole company. It means we're getting at bats much more frequently. And our message in 90 days, I can tell you has dramatically changed and will continue to change. That is the playbook. Now everybody is unique. Treat them that

KK (21:46)

Hmm.

Mark Petruzzi (21:47)

Yeah, yeah, beautiful. Let's move to ⁓ topic two. And maybe we'll even switch it up a little bit. Topic two is when forecasting breaks, what to trust instead. But I'd even like to take it a step further and just put it out there to your point when everything has changed and will continue to change in ways that we're not used to. We're not used to the

know, speed of change keeps getting faster and faster. And it's, it's kind of been unleashed. It's, know, we, got a real feel for it during the pandemic. You know, I think amazingly, most companies were able to really be nimble and efficient in that. But they're, they're gonna, they're gonna have to get used to that being the, the standard, not the exception. So when you look at that and you look at just general forecasting tools,

Stephen Messer (22:16)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (22:45)

you know, most forecasting tools or anything that's called the forecasting process is pretty much looking only at historical data. And when the market's changing as quickly as it is today, that data becomes irrelevant very, very quickly. So what are the biggest risks in relying on those outdated forecasting methods? you know, and where does it even go from here? Because...

your product is going to keep evolving and changing and daily forecasting is going to turn into hourly forecasting.

Stephen Messer (23:19)

Yeah. You know, you're a hundred percent right. mean, I will tell you, we could turn on hourly today if you wanted, by the way. We're already set up for that. think, if your forecasting process relies on interviewing your sellers, if your forecasting process relies on using machine learning only on your data, yourself, I think...

KK (23:39)

your own core force instance, your own, yeah.

Stephen Messer (23:43)

You are driving a car through your rear view mirror. You are going to crash into something. It is inevitable. It will be deadly. It will be bad. You just don't realize it because you think it's better than it was last year. And there was a period of time when you only had your own data to make predictions on. I look the reason why we look at our whole network, the reason why our customers pull it, the reason why the Wall Street Journal called us the ways for sales.

KK (23:46)

Eee.

Stephen Messer (24:13)

was because our assumption was it was easier to study the buyer to predict what the buyer was going to do than studying the seller to predict what the buyer is going to do. That should be obvious. It is crazy. There is an insanity that thinks that by studying my seller, I will predict what the buyer is doing. You are looking at the wrong person. These moments are the moments you realize the logic failure that you have.

If you're going daily, you are reacting at the speed your customer is feeling a pain. You will be buyer centric by its nature because you are studying the buyer. If you are doing a forecasting process, you are basically all trying to agree that none of you really know what's going on. It may make you feel good, but it doesn't matter. When we are driving on a distance in a trip that matters, we don't ask our four friends

what the trip should be, what direction we should take, and how long we will arrive. We go to Google Maps in ways for a reason. It knows about the road ahead. It's learning for more people. These are the moments you realize your systems are broken. They feel familiar. They feel good. But I think we're going to look back in a year, and nobody is going to believe that they used those antiquated systems and antiquated approaches. If you've done it for 30 years, it's antiquated.

I think this is a moment where you see a giant transformation. Now, is it that hard to learn? No. It feels like it. When we did COVID, do you remember when everyone was like, how is the country going to survive? And in two weeks, everybody learned to do business on Zoom.

KK (25:57)

Mm-hmm. It's pretty great actually when you think about that.

Stephen Messer (25:59)

This is one of those, this is one of those

moments where like you literally could turn it on. We get our customers live in no time. Literally, you could be live and have it. Yeah, you could literally be there tomorrow seeing how it works. And you could use people like you guys and say, how the hell do I use this thing? It is so easy. It's fear. But you know what? These moments drive people to have to overcome their fear. And that's when they make these big moments of change.

KK (26:08)

Right. Like, overnight. ⁓

Yeah.

Well, some of the, you know, historically, when you think back to any recessionary period, some of the some of our greatest companies were founded and took off in a recessionary time. And I'm not saying that that I think we're headed towards a recession, just knowing that things are volatile and people have the same reaction where they tend to sit on their hands. And coupled that with knowing that really and truly there's a massive opportunity.

when you have volatility like this, like this is when you can really shine and figure out how your product or service that you're selling can really help your customer solve the problems that they need to solve, like whatever it is, right?

Mark Petruzzi (27:11)

Yeah.

Stephen Messer (27:13)

You are 100 % right.

Mark Petruzzi (27:13)

And KK, just, KK, you just brought us in a great direction here. And I'd like to take the whole conversation up to that point. And I'll start it with a quick story. I've been fortunate enough to have met John Chambers, the former CEO of Cisco a few different times. And the last time I was with him, he told the story to a bunch of us about Cisco and then more generally about

his view on capturing growth and capturing market share. And his point of view is that there's never any growth that's captured or market share that's captured in high growth situations. Because in his theory, companies just, get on, they catch the wave, they get a little sloppy, which we've seen that over and over again, and they all kind of become more like each other and become more commodities.

Stephen Messer (28:04)

.

Mark Petruzzi (28:08)

difficult times and he used the example of I believe it was the Kyoto earthquake in Japan when he just instead of like taking his Asia pack unit and just going into protection mode He looked at that and he said this is when we're gonna grab market share and he took a extremely difficult market environment and turned it into a

huge market share grab for Cisco and I mean that really hit home because

We're in that situation now globally. What an opportunity to go and really look at this, especially because we have this little word that means so much now and means different things to every different person. But this little word, this little acronym AI, like you can use that and leverage it into that market share grab today.

KK (28:40)

We are.

Steven, one of the things that you always say, and I quote you all the time, is that a seller with super intelligence on their side will outperform a seller without it any day of the week. And it's like, so we've got this volatile time, which is an incredible opportunity, as we've discussed, we've got AI in our corner that we can leverage to be incredibly differentiated. Like, I'm excited. Like, I'm excited about this.

Stephen Messer (29:02)

Lucky.

Yep.

Look, if you are a seller or a leader and you're freaking out right now, you are not seeing market opportunity. You have the wrong tooling. If you are there trying to figure out, I going to make my end of quarter? And you've got all these systems that's not working. It is not working for a reason, right? These are the moments where you realize the water has gone out. I am naked. Please help me. And you can make that change and transition very quickly. I think there are companies like us.

We are grabbing market share like crazy now because they have installed all these systems. And I'm able to point out, you used forecasting example. We do a lot more than forecasting, but let's just use forecasting because you brought it up. It's taking 20 % of their activity on Friday. You only have so many days left in this quarter and you're going to give up one of them to debate with each other. Your opinions based on what news you read and what you're hearing from customers of what your outcome is going to be. Do you know how many CROs are going to get fired?

for missing their number because they had no ability to tell in advance what was going on. And the board who's asking right now, what is this going to mean for our quarter? They are saying things like, I am hearing from my teams, as opposed to, we use a product like Collective Eye, which there's only us, but let's just say, I use Collective Eye and I'm seeing that the AI is telling me.

Mark Petruzzi (30:45)

Yeah. ⁓

Stephen Messer (30:50)

this is what's happening with my deals and I know exactly which ones to go into right away and I know exactly which person to talk to and I know exactly how to handle the situation and I'm going to do my best to deal with it but here are strategies that I'm going out there with because I'm trying to do what I can to salvage this crazy market and that is the difference between someone who can show the board that they like.

I would argue a lot of these people who are out there, and I'm sorry if they're listening and you're upset, if you're thinking I have put in tooling and I'm trying to manage it, you should be fired. The board should not be relying on you or your company or your team's opinion. That is insane. Can you imagine a banker or a broker saying to you, my personal opinion was this stock was going to do well? No, you better have a quantitative analysis that tells me exactly what's happening so at least I understand what's going on.

You are not doing your fiduciary obligation by appalling people's opinion. This is insane. It's insane.

Mark Petruzzi (31:45)

Yeah. And you know what, Stephen?

Stephen, you're taking me into a whole nother point as well. ⁓ And I'll try to make this a little bit of an analogy. But first, I'll start with a premise and a hypothesis. And this is something I truly believe. But sales reps are incredible manipulators. And some of them more than others. But they are really good at delivering their narrative. And what they want to see happen

and managing up to their CRO, to their CEO as well. So you're doing this polling as you're describing, and you're getting all these different sales reps to kind of put in their agenda. It almost feels to me like if you were, no matter what your political background is, if you were to say, I want to find out about something that happened, the Ukrainian-Russian peace talks,

and you brought on individuals and you brought one commentator from Fox News, one from CNN and one from MSNBC and you found some of the new brands out there. I mean, could you imagine what kind of information you would have at the end of that day and how they would, you would go into one thing and you'd be told one thing and then you go into the other thing and you'd be told an entirely different thing. But that is what happens and we know it.

Stephen Messer (32:47)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (33:10)

because we've all been CROs, we've all been sales leaders on this call. And that's what I've never thought of it this way. Maybe it's the political environment we're in today. But that's what some of those days have felt like to me now that I think back at them, because I would be amazed. I would have one sales leader telling me one thing about the economy and another one telling me an entirely different thing. One group that's saying they're gonna hit every one of their commit deals.

and one of them coming in and saying, I'm not gonna hit any. And then only to find out that the one that said they weren't gonna hit any hit half. And the one that said they were gonna hit all hit 30%. So it's amazing and your tool does take a lot of that out of the equation. And what it also does is it takes the wasted time because same thing, if you're just gonna listen to political commentary all day long for 12 hours a day, you're kind of wasting your time because

Stephen Messer (33:44)

Yep.

Mark Petruzzi (34:07)

no matter what and no matter how smart you are, you're not gonna get like, you're not gonna get an answer, because there's not one answer.

Stephen Messer (34:13)

Yeah.

KK (34:14)

It's impossible to

know without that. And I'll say one thing, and then I want to ask you a question about kind of trusting the data, because I know that there's listeners out there thinking, yeah, this sounds really cool, but how do I know I can trust this data? So I want to go there in a minute. So for us at AGS, where Mark and I are a firm, we

Stephen Messer (34:28)

Yeah.

KK (34:37)

you know, we use collective eye. And so we, log in every morning and I, and I look at the odds of the different opportunities that, we're, that we're working on. And I always think to myself, you know, red light, yellow light, green light, right? And if a deal has an odds that is like 80 % or higher, I'm like green light, everything's tracking well there. And if we have a team members that have deals that are in the yellow light, which is like, you know, I would say 60 to 75 % or 80%.

Stephen Messer (34:50)

you

KK (35:05)

That's where I'm now gonna spend my day. And when I make that phone call to our seller and say, hey, how can I support, how can we create differentiation in XYZ opportunity because it's a yellow light, right? And I know that we really want this and this would be a really great win for us. It's a yellow light. Like, what can we do to really make sure we understand everything at play? And then that's a true coaching conversation, not a...

Stephen Messer (35:33)

Yeah.

KK (35:34)

you know, saying the same, you know, stuff to every single salesperson that you talk to on every single call, you feel like you're saying the same thing like a broken record, right? So that red light, yellow light, green light is really cool as far as productivity and being able to coach in the moment, those types of things. But take me back to how do I know I can trust this? Like I know we're going to have some skeptics out there.

Stephen Messer (35:43)

Yeah.

Look, there are, look, my ideal a lot, as you know, with a lot of people say they're snowflake, our business works differently. Our, I would say there's two things to realize. One is everyone thinks that the challenge that they went through to figure out how to sell their product is what an AI has to. And the other thing is they think they're selling a product. Here's what makes all this stuff work so well. One is just understand we're studying the buyer across everyone in our network. It's pooled data.

It is like Google Maps. learns from every driver. what part of the challenge that the selling team always is dealing with is trying to figure out how to sell their product, but they don't realize it's a random walk. Their buyer is going through a buying process. They think they're selling it. No, they're going about their process of buying it. Their process is pretty consistent. They're pro. In fact, if you've ever had a customer, you're selling every month.

more more stuff to you know their process really well. You know exactly how long it takes. know who needs to sign it off. You know how to pick that one pretty well. It's all the fact that you're selling to new customers all the time that it looks like a random walk. It is things that are feeling similar. It is things that have kind of commonalities, but generally it's a buying process. So when we study that buyer at buying organizations all day long across our network, we're able to make really good predictions.

We're taking in your data to learn about you. Yeah, there's some uniqueness. We're going to learn about that. But generally, we're learning that. So the first thing is conceptually recognize that what we're studying is the actual person who can make the decision and their team and their company and everything that's going on all day long. If you understand that, when you start to see the use of the product, because the only way you'll ever believe it is using it. If you use Google Maps or Waze,

Mark Petruzzi (37:35)

Yeah.

Stephen Messer (37:45)

And someone told you it could tell you where the police were, you would say, that's BS. Until you see your first example, or where it routes you in a shortcut, or it knows about an accident beforehand, you see an example. If I had told you three years ago about this amazing thing called ChatGBT that could draft and do all these great things, that you would say, Steve, you're crazy. But then you played with it, and you were like, my goodness. And then you played more, and you realized there's better and better ways to write prompts.

to get even better results, you start to go down the rabbit hole. There is no way that I, KK, you or Mark will convince people to believe something until they see it for themselves. But here's what I love. What I love are all the people who say, I don't believe it, so I'm not gonna give it a try. I think you need to prove me wrong. That is like me commenting, I don't like Paris, but I've never visited France.

Okay, that is not a fair representation. That is an opinion based on nothing. So if you can't take that gamble to try it out, and we give lots of free ways for people to try it out. Intelligence.com is one free way. We give people 14 days to try it and opt out if they don't like it without any cost. We do lots of really cool things to give people the chance to try it. But if you don't try it, you've got a bigger problem. That means you're just trying to reinforce your own bias.

that it can't work because you're afraid of something, whether you're afraid it's going to take over your job or whether you're it's not going to work or whether you're afraid you're going to look stupid or you're afraid. Trust me, until you're in it, you just, you don't have the ability to make that decision. Now, can I point out one last thing before I jump off that subject? Cause I think this fear is an important thing. The one group we haven't talked about that will affect every seller that will affect every sales leader and every org right now is

The only natural predator for a CRO is the board. And there are a lot of people out there thinking, I can manage the board. But the statistics of a 15 month tenure on average for CROs say boards don't believe your BS. They have gotten the place where you have spent all this money on tooling that is based on studying the seller, not the buyer.

So they do not believe anything you are saying. And if you show up at the end of this quarter or during the quarter when they're asking questions about how is this stuff that's going on affecting our business, and it starts with I think, or my team believes, you have a shark circling around you waiting to feed on you because they are thinking I have a fiduciary obligation to shareholders.

whether I'm a PE firm, whether I'm a VC firm, or whether there's gesture investors and they are saying, think, you think the entire business, we have to make decisions on how to do capital allocation, whether we should be staffing up, staffing down, building or retracting. have debt holders and your argument is I've spoken to my team. You don't have a quantitative way to say we use collective eye, it studies the entire.

sales world and what it's telling me right now is that we're going to get hit and here's where we're going to get hit or we should be doubling down in this sector because this sector is growing and we can put our money there and we can make up for our numbers because if the answer is I met with my team on Friday and we believe that we're still going to be on track.

Mark Petruzzi (41:28)

It's trouble.

Stephen Messer (41:28)

You can hear

and you can see the shark circling, thinking, how do we let this guy be in charge of our business?

Mark Petruzzi (41:36)

Well, especially Steven, you've kind of used the shark analogy, but it is the DNA of those women and men who are typically on boards are entirely different than the typical DNA for a CRO. And they are only, it's black and white. It's what are the reports show? What does the data show? I mean, that's why data as, know, leveraging data science in every function within a company

why do you think that is such an easy investment for a board to make? They're like, yes, I want more data. And I've been asking you to get more data from your customers for years. And you've got this CRM system. And every time you go and do a presentation, you start the presentation by saying, we don't really have great information on our customers. And we're trying to get better. And we're working on it. So you're 100 %

Stephen Messer (42:28)

Yeah.

We have pipeline cleanup.

here's how our pipeline's grown, but we have some cleanup we need to do. Yeah, I sit on boards. I sit on public boards. I sit on private boards. Trust me, here's what they don't see, What they don't see is the CFO comes in, perfect numbers, no opinions. The CMO comes in and shows what's happening in the market.

Mark Petruzzi (42:36)

It's the same thing.

Stephen Messer (42:55)

with quantifiable, here's how we got our cact down. Here's where we're spending. We're seeing less conversion right here. The seller comes in, leans back. So let me tell you what's going on. Here's what we're hearing. Here's what we're feeling. Here's what we're saying. Here's how we're changing. We're going to implement methodologies. We're going to change some of our hiring practices. And they're just like, give me something I can rely on. And the numbers they put in the board book come out of systems that they know are fake.

like CRM, they come out of things where they're looking at the numbers and nothing adds up because they're like, last quarter, you came and said you had 10 million in ⁓ new pipe, but I'm seeing now 15. Should I read that? And they're like, well, we have cleanup and ⁓ we still have work to do. We're still implementing some things. Our CRM needs to get redone. They're just like, what the hell is going on here? And they're done with it.

Mark Petruzzi (43:24)

Yep. Yep.

Yeah.

Stephen Messer (43:53)

That's what

you see happening when you see the high turnover. They're basically saying we have to find someone who can actually manage this business with data. And that is not a process. Let me come back to that. That is a machine spitting out trustworthy, consistently quantified, up-to-date information. I would rather be a CRO walking in saying, look, I'll show you the trend of where the AI was predicting. You can see here.

And you know, you could do this in tele. It'll say, you could see here when the tariffs went on, immediately our odds went down and you can see which deals got pushed back out. You could see the impact of that. Now the tariffs came off and you could see exactly how it rippled through. And by the way, when they asked me questions, how great would it be to be able to go on a tele and just say, okay, which parts of our business or which regions or which industries had the biggest impact? And it comes back immediately with an answer. So now you're giving them hard answers with factual information.

And then you could bring them to examples and show them. Here's where you can see the customer started saying these things and look how the odds started changing. And now they're like, okay, you have control of your revenue. You have control of your business. That's what people care about.

Mark Petruzzi (45:01)

Yes.

KK (45:01)

My heart.

Mark Petruzzi (45:04)

And Stephen, what they also get, you also get to do as a CRO there is say, okay, this even when you have bad news to report and you could say, well, this is what the numbers with Collective Eye started showing me 30 days ago. And this is what we did. And this is my response. And this is what the team came up with. And guess what? We've seen this response now. We've seen the numbers going up. We're back in a better point.

KK (45:24)

Yes.

Mark Petruzzi (45:34)

And like I do that all day long. mean, and when I started using Collective Eye, you know, I, I wanted this to be as amazing of a product. And, and, you know, for me, this started all the way back in, in work that I was doing with BCG where, you know, there was a lot of really smart people that right at the beginning were like, this isn't going to work. Collective Eye isn't going to do what it said. And, and there's all these things and these are people I respect. And so I kind of went in with first like,

I didn't believe anything. I was testing all kinds of things. The things you and I have talked about, Stephen, like where, okay, I have three meetings on an account. Well, is that gonna make my account jump up 20 points in the forecast ⁓ odds? And I've done that and I've seen it. And again, yes, do meetings and interaction help your forecast? Usually, but is it the main driver?

And right now, like for example, in accounts that me and KK have, that we've had a bunch of great interaction and emails, but the numbers are still going down because there's macroeconomic and geopolitical things happening here that are bigger than our little meetings that I'm having. That's the difference. But I love the concept and I want to just share it one more time for our audience of, you get to do this stuff almost real time.

Stephen Messer (46:35)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (47:00)

and see what your actions and your thoughts and those great strategic ideas that you come up with and you get to see how it's really gonna impact your revenue at the end of the day. That's amazing to me.

Stephen Messer (47:09)

Thank

KK (47:14)

And if you're going to be like in this case, there's a deal that Mark and I

Stephen Messer (47:17)

you.

KK (47:17)

are working on right now actually, we, gosh, we feel so good about it, but man, the odds are not good and we're not happy about that. And it's telling us, you know what, don't spend five hours working on that. Go, go bark up another tree, go find something else, go prospect. You know, you, you know, it's, it's, you, you see the immediate impact of the markets on your pipeline, but then that education.

Stephen Messer (47:33)

Yeah.

KK (47:44)

just makes you so much smarter. Right? And yeah.

Stephen Messer (47:47)

So cool.

It's so cool. What's so cool about it is what you're both saying is it's hard if you haven't seen this as a someone who's watching this via it's hard to get that like you will see deals where you have tons of activities and the odds keep going down and you'll have deals where you have no activities. The answer shooting up. You're like what's going on? And what it is is that's the market that we're capturing telling you something. And so you all of sudden you're like I mean the first time you'll see it. They're like something's wrong. I didn't do anything on that. I'm like no.

KK (48:08)

Yeah.

Stephen Messer (48:15)

Pick up the phone. You pick up the phone, they're like, what great timing. You're like, how did it know? But that's the power of these network models is you start to get this wow factor and you start to realize tons of activity does not indicate that it's working well. Sometimes they're just being really polite. Sometimes even if they wanted to buy, they just don't have the dollars, but they want to learn. There's so many things you learn. And in these moments, I'll give a great example. KK called me up today and she's like, my God, the macro. She's like, I can see in certain deals.

Mark Petruzzi (48:30)

Yeah

KK (48:36)

Mm-hmm.

Stephen Messer (48:44)

that are in certain areas exactly what's going on. It's like you can see it on a daily basis. We call it cycle time, which is if I can get down to a daily feedback loop of how did yesterday affect my tomorrow. That doesn't just mean me. That means like everything. How does it, what's happening? I can now quickly react to it because even if it's just putting in a phone call to say, my God, I saw what happened yesterday with Powell. How are you guys holding up? And if they're like, this stuff is whiplash is killing me.

Tell me what's going on. Can I give you an introduction to someone? Can I help with this problem in some other way? Like, hey, do you need me to slow down because you're worried about it? You're gonna find out faster and you're gonna not invest the wrong time or good time in bad places. And you also might be able to build a relationship that grows. I will tell you, we are growing faster in the last month and a half than we've ever grown and we've been growing fast. It is because all of a sudden everyone's like, I can't.

KK (49:28)

I'm not.

Stephen Messer (49:41)

wait a week to know what's going on. And I definitely don't want to ask people who themselves don't know what's going on. And all of sudden now we're dropping in fast, showing people and they're grateful because they're like, imagine if I had this and it's not too late, right? I have a feeling we're in for a lot more volatility because the world is becoming like.

There's a risk of Taiwan going to war. There is a risk that India goes to war with China. There's a risk that the Ukraine problem doesn't get better, that it gets worse. We have Yemen shooting missiles again. We have the threat of Iran war. Like just macro things like that, yet alone what's happening day to day and the disruption that AI is causing in all parts of the business. I don't think we're going through a very volatile period, which is for me, thankfully using collective eye, my own product, because I eat my own dog food. I am excited.

KK (50:20)

your life.

Stephen Messer (50:30)

because this is the moment that people realize everything they're doing needs to change. That doesn't happen often. I want to grab it. I want every one of your people listening here to feel excited, not fearful what's going to happen each day.

Mark Petruzzi (50:35)

Yeah.

Yeah, incredible.

KK (50:44)

Right.

One thing I'll also say before we wrap up, this has been such a fun episode. It took me, gosh, what am I now? Almost 49. It took me a lot of years to get to a point where I actually look forward to challenges. Because when I see them, when I find myself in a challenge, my first thought is,

cannot wait to grow. I cannot wait to see how I get better and stronger as a result of this. I almost welcome it. I go as far as to say I'm almost looking for them. And so that's sort of the lens and the perspective that we have to have as sales leaders, as sellers going into these times. Don't be afraid to change. Don't be afraid to jump in.

That's just my perspective there. And I will say, we're going to put in the show notes here a link to be able to learn more about these great systems as well. So ⁓ head there and make sure you go to learn more.

Mark Petruzzi (51:55)

Yeah.

Stephen Messer (51:56)

Look,

pair yourself up with the super intelligence. That's my main point. I think you said it best, KK, which is, you ⁓ you can overcome any challenge if you're aware of it. If you're unaware of it, it's just you're living in fear that something is going to drop that's going to blow your quarter. Something's going to drop that's going to blow your pipe. Something's going to drop. That's not going to give you the ability to overcome it because you're going to find out far too late to fix it. Overcoming things is what makes a great seller.

KK (51:59)

Yep.

Stephen Messer (52:24)

wake up in the morning and think today is the day I earned my keep. I did something great. And if you get a daily feedback like Collective Eye gives, you will literally wake up saying, this is where I need to be, or it's not worth it. You're not going to get surprises anymore. And I love the point of we can overcome anything. KK, I've seen you do it. I've seen Mark do it. Every one of us who's listening to this has seen great people do it. If given the chance, you can overcome something.

not given the chance because you didn't want to listen, which is really what Collective Eye is doing. It's just listening on your behalf and telling you what this means for it's a translator of what the buyer is trying to tell you. If you're not listening, you're not in the game. You think you are, but you're not.

Mark Petruzzi (52:54)

Yeah, you don't have a chance.

KK (53:08)

Mm-hmm.

Mark Petruzzi (53:09)

Yeah.

Stephen, I'll close real quickly with a little bit of another story here. it's when I was ⁓ kind of college time, you know, year or two after college. Well, my whole life, I had a friend who actually went into the Green Beret and the special forces and we would always meet up and there would be seven or eight special forces, individuals with two or three of us that were

you know, the ones who don't have that kind of training and background. And I don't want to make it seem like I'm someone who would ever be looking to get into a fight in a bar or something. But there were bars that we would go to when we knew we had those Green Berets with us, then where we would, you know, we'd never even think about going to without them. And that's kind of the way I feel with Collective Eye. And you just got to use it for good, not...

not evil and that's goal.

Stephen Messer (54:08)

Amen.

KK (54:09)

Yeah

Stephen Messer (54:09)

Amen. Amen. And we will.

Mark Petruzzi (54:11)

Beautiful.

Yep. it's, well, Stephen, first off, it's amazing. We are so grateful for the relationship we have with you and your team. And we're so grateful to have been an early, early adopter and get to leverage it every day. And thank you for taking the time with us today. This was awesome.

Stephen Messer (54:33)

That's mutual and I hope your community communicates to you because they could get a lot of their questions answered really easily from you guys. You guys are power users. You're amazing. We've loved working with you. We've learned from you and ⁓ so grateful to be on today and hopefully give people some excitement, not fear around this volatile market.

Mark Petruzzi (54:52)

Yeah, beautiful. Thank you again. All the best.

KK (54:53)

Absolutely. Thank you, Stephen. We'll see

you next time, okay?

Stephen Messer (54:56)

Thank

you guys. Can't wait anytime you want.

Mark Petruzzi (55:00)

Perfect. And thanks to our amazing audience. Have a great day all. Cheers.

KK (55:00)

Absolutely.

Mark Petruzzi (55:12)

It will not let me, there we go, okay.

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

In Part 2 of this Selling the Cloud conversation, Stephen Messer, Co-Founder of Collective[i], continues to challenge the status quo of sales technology and leadership—this time focusing on how GTM teams can embrace AI, real-time data, and agile principles to navigate today’s complex buying environments.

Stephen and the hosts explore what’s broken in forecasting, why reactive CRM systems create risk, and how the modern seller’s mindset needs to evolve in a world where speed, adaptability, and intelligence win.

What You’ll Learn:

• The Rise of Agile Selling: Why sales leaders need to build systems that adapt in real time—not ones that just report what already happened.
• AI-Enhanced Forecasting: How predictive intelligence is helping teams eliminate bias and plan more accurately.
• Why CRM Alone Is a Liability: A deep dive into why legacy sales systems fail in fast-moving markets.
• How to Spot Buying Signals Earlier: What modern sales orgs are doing to move faster and respond with precision.
• Changing the Sales Culture: Why the future of sales leadership depends on embracing new data models and tech-forward practices.

Key Topics:

• Limitations of CRM forecasting
• Integrating AI for signal-based selling
• Buyer journey complexity and data latency
• Building an agile, responsive GTM motion
• Real-time revenue intelligence tools
• Leadership shifts for the AI-enabled seller
• 
  

Guest Spotlight: Stephen Messer

Stephen is Co-Founder and Vice Chairman of Collective[i], a revenue intelligence platform leveraging AI to enable agile sales execution. He’s a serial entrepreneur with a passion for reshaping how sales teams operate in dynamic, data-rich environments.

Resources & Mentions:

• Company: Collective[i]
• Topics: Agile revenue strategy, AI forecasting, CRM alternatives
• Suggested Reading: The JOLT Effect, The Qualified Sales Leader, The Sales Acceleration Formula

🎧 Listen now and follow Selling the Cloud for more episodes on modern GTM, enterprise sales, and AI-led transformation. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

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