Selling Intelligence (formerly Selling the Cloud)

In this episode of Selling the Cloud, Mark Petruzzi and KK Anderson sit down with Mark Roberge, founding CRO at HubSpot and author of The Sales Acceleration Formula, to unpack why most companies scale at the wrong time and with the wrong signals. Mark introduces a stage-specific, data-driven framework for moving from product market fit to go to market fit, and explains why managing to readiness and retention beats chasing top-line revenue alone.

Mark breaks down how founders and boards get trapped copying outdated playbooks, why product market fit is often misunderstood, and how to define it through value realization, not just revenue. He also shares a practical approach for finding a leading indicator of retention, then translating unit economics into clear operating KPIs that make scaling repeatable, profitable, and measurable.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why scaling “scientifically” requires managing to readiness and retention, not just revenue growth.
• The difference between market-message fit and true product market fit.
• How to define product market fit using retention and value realization.
• How to build a leading indicator of retention using a simple “P percent do event every T time” framework.
• Why startups should delay scalable processes until product market fit is proven.
• What go to market fit actually means and how unit economics define it.
• How to translate LTV:CAC targets into practical KPIs like quota, close rates, and meeting volume.
• How to diagnose pipeline problems as readiness issues vs volume issues using conversion patterns across reps.

Key Topics:

• The danger of copying borrowed playbooks from past unicorns
• Readiness pacing vs hiring based on fundraising timelines
• Product market fit as value creation, not revenue milestones
• Leading indicators of retention and early customer success signals
• Go to market fit and unit economics as the profitability test
• Turning unit economics into a repeatable go to market formula
• Quick tests for pipeline issues: lead quality vs sales execution
• Why small funnel improvements compound faster than single big swings

Guest Spotlight: Mark Roberge

Mark Roberge is the founding CRO at HubSpot, where he helped scale the company from zero to IPO. He is co-founder and managing partner at Stage 2 Capital, a Harvard Business School senior lecturer focused on sales and go-to-market strategy, and the best-selling author of The Sales Acceleration Formula. His newest book, The Science of Scaling, distills decades of research into a stage-specific roadmap for scaling with measurable readiness.

Resources & Mentions:

• Book: The Science of Scaling (pre-order available)
• Book: The Sales Acceleration Formula
• Concept: Product Market Fit vs Go to Market Fit vs Growth and Moat
• Framework: “P percent of customers do event every T time”
• Example: Slack’s activation benchmark (high-volume team messaging)
• SaaS Metrics: Retention, Leading Indicator of Retention, LTV:CAC, Payback Period
• Reference: Winning by Design and compounding funnel improvement

🎧 Follow Selling the Cloud for more episodes on building durable GTM systems, improving sales execution, and scaling revenue with confidence.

Mark (00:00)

Welcome to Selling the Cloud. Our guest today is Mark Roberge, founding CRO at HubSpot, who has helped lead the team from zero to IPO, a beautiful IPO. He's now the co-founder and managing partner at States2 Capital. He's a long time Harvard Business School professor of sales and entrepreneurship and go-to-market. And he's the best-selling author of the Sales Acceleration Formula. Mark's new book,

the science of scaling distills 25 years of research into a stage specific data driven roadmap for moving from product market fit to go to market fit and ultimately to growth and mode. Personal note, Mark and I have known each other for a few years here and he is a great person to know as a friend and certainly as a business colleague with all the incredible success he's had throughout his career.

So let's jump into the four topics we will cover today. also just to remind us all to make sure we cover a little bit of the amazing things that Mark does for McLean Hospital and for mental health and in general throughout our country and the world. Four topics, why scale scientifically? The failure patterns leaders repeat and how to replace borrowed playbooks.

with a measurable readiness model. We're go deeper into product market fit, defining ICP, instrumenting a leading indicator of retention that proves value creation and learning how to run fast learning loops within your organization. And then what does it mean to go to market fit and deeper there, how process hiring, demand gen, pricing and compensation.

evolve to make revenue consistent and profitable. And then the dream, the growth and most, when you're pacing head count, choosing scalable channels, raising price with confidence and appropriateness, and running a metrics cadence board, an approach that drives trust throughout the entire organization. Mark, thanks so much for joining us. Welcome to Selling the Cloud.

Mark Roberge (02:14)

Hey, thank you, Mark. Thanks, KK. Appreciate all the preparation in that wonderful intro.

Mark (02:20)

Beautiful, thank you, Mark. So yeah, topic one, why scale scientifically? We see teams copy a hot playbook, know, ramp up spend, and then they learn six months later in many cases that renewals are soft. So they kind of work on the first side of the equation, but they really don't do the right planning and approach in making sure that they're really able to build long-term client relationships. The science says,

manage to readiness and retention, not just the top line. We all know that companies are feeling that for the first time in a number of years as we move from the pandemic to a little more of a specific focus on making sure the growth is there and also that we get to profitability with many of these early stage SaaS companies. So what changes when a founder manages to the readiness and retention?

instead of just revenue only. And what is one decision you would stop immediately when the data is noisy and contains more clutter than signals?

Mark Roberge (03:25)

Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there. So really a lot of the origination of that question comes back to my time after HubSpot before starting stage two. I had this interesting five year period where a lot of this work was originated. ⁓ I honestly did not intend to write another book, but sometimes you do a speech or write an article that

⁓ becomes something bigger, I suppose, and people want more. And then you can start to see the timeliness and also the abstraction by which some of the framing could be applied. And so at the time I was teaching full-time at HBS, but also had a lot of time to participate in the startup ecosystem. As a board member, angel investor, advisor, I basically chose one company every quarter.

to spend a day a week with and help them build out their opening sales org. ⁓ At the same time, I was a senior advisor at BCG and I was working with these massive global conglomerates on launching new products to drive revenue, top line growth and EBITDA. And I just found in both situations that there was an unnecessarily high failure rate because this concept of like,

when you were ready to scale, like you got your product, you got your beta, you got your whatever. And like the time that you were ready to scale and the pacing was not analyzed strategically well enough. And that's what made me kind of start to reflect on these things on like ⁓ how can you use your own data to figure that out? In the startup arena,

Pretty much it was aligned with like when they raised capital. They just happened to convince ⁓ VC to give them some capital and then that was the time that they were ready to scale supposedly because they had capital. And the pacing was essentially like copy whatever some other unicorn that just went public. What did they do 10 years ago the year after they raised their seed round?

Mark (05:47)

Thanks

Mark Roberge (05:47)

Which like is, it doesn't make any sense. The contextual differences are so, so off. And then on the, on the big company size, it was like, Hey, we're going to launch this new product and engineering, you build it. We're going to launch it at our customer event in nine months and marketing, change the website and get the collateral going and sales, train all the salespeople and customer support, get all your scripts ready. And then they launched and wasted tons of sales motions on a product that didn't have

product market fit. So it's like two different diagnoses with the same issue. And that's what led to the research and understanding why some of these went, some of the companies that I'd worked with did an IPO, a billion dollar outcome, some went bankrupt. And what was the difference in their plan? And it was this three sequence framework of product market fit, then go to market fit and growth and moat is what

Over last decade, we've been coaching people to at State Shoe Capital and my work at Harvard Business School with my founders to have a more scientific approach to that. Now, to your point, Mark, you're asking about a focus on customer value creation. And I said the first step is product market fit, which isn't like profound. Normally when you go into like a classroom and ask like a bunch of 30 year old founders, how do know when you're ready to scale?

they'll say product market fit, which is a great answer and a term that didn't exist in the year 2000. I think it was popularized by Eric Reese at Lean Startup or Steve Blank. it's like, the term caused us to progress as entrepreneurs. It's fantastic. But what's weird right now is when you turn around and ask those hundred entrepreneurs, what is product market fit, you get a hundred different answers. And half of them are like correlated to revenue and customer count.

we have product market fit when we hit a million in revenue. We have product market fit when we have a ton of inbound leads. We have product market fit when we have 15 customers. Mark KK, we all know that like great sellers can sell ice to Eskimos. They can. ⁓ But Eskimos don't need ice. You know, when you can sell, you have market message fit. It just means you're going out there, people get interested and they buy.

Mark (08:02)

Yeah. Yeah.

Mark Roberge (08:12)

But the essence of product market fit means that whatever you promised them came true. It means they realized the value. It means they succeed with your product. And in a lot of the businesses that we work in, ⁓ that's best quantified by customer retention. Right? So that's really the backstory mark on your question of like, you know, why do we have to root the opening stages here in customer value creation and retention as opposed to top line revenue growth?

And it's just because like acquiring a customer, generating revenue is just a step in the end process ultimately to get to the value realization.

Mark (08:51)

Mark, you've given us so many things to unpack here and we're gonna dive into all of those. Before I do though, I wanna make sure I cover one item you mentioned there that really, so many things hit me, but this one hit me directly. This concept of like taking the last similar company that went public or had a great exit and trying to replicate the plan there. That would be like Harvard Neuroscience researchers.

saying we're going to start a new study, but we're only going to use information of 10 years old or longer. We're not going to look at anything in the last 10 years or five years. We're going to start from there. And we all know where that would bring us, and really not bring us in.

Mark Roberge (09:33)

And even worse than

that, Mark, it's not just like someone doing a neuro study today and copy what was done in 2015, but also that they were in the potiatry department in 2015. That's really the fair analogy is like the context is so different. It's like, oh, we are bringing, you know, a cyber security AI agent to finance departments today.

Mark (09:46)

Yeah, that's a better one.

KK Anderson (09:47)

you

Mark (10:02)

Right.

Yeah.

Mark Roberge (10:03)

So let's copy what HubSpot did in 2010 as they brought marketing software to landscapers.

Mark (10:11)

Perfect, that is perfect. That is much better, love it. All right, KK, let's take us on. We're going upward.

Mark Roberge (10:12)

Ha ha ha ha ha.

KK Anderson (10:19)

First of all, Mark, thank you so much for giving us a pre-read of your book. I can already tell that it's going to 100 % become a Bible in our industry. I was just reading the other day that I think just this year alone, there were something like 2000 AI businesses that started up. So it's very timely. A lot of founders.

Mark Roberge (10:22)

You bet, KK.

KK Anderson (10:39)

starting up and they're going to be going, as I was reading this, was thinking of our clients and thinking, I wonder if Mark will let me forward this onto our clients because it's just, it's on the mark every step of the way. ⁓ retention, you talk about retention, I couldn't agree more. But that's lagging, you that's a lagging indicator. And so we need an early signal that

Mark Roberge (11:01)

Yes.

KK Anderson (11:05)

that actually helps us kind of figure that out. And so you talk about in the you know, that the framework and figuring out that that leading indicator of retention. So what is like

Talk to me about how you figure that out. It's a chicken or an egg. You need revenue, but you need retention. How do you, in those early stages, how do you do that?

Mark Roberge (11:19)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that's

a great tee up on where we left off here, KK. So, you know, what we've got so far is like, okay, that makes sense. I have my product and I need to figure out my first North Star. And we're arguing so far that like, don't get in front of your company and say, we got the product. Let's get to a million in revenue. We're saying we got the product. Let's get to dozens of customers using this and being successful. Let's have our percent conversion from

sign customer to successful customer would be really high. And we're measuring that with retention. To your point, KK, like we can't, like a lot of times we don't really have a sense of the retention on the customers we signed up this month for like a year. You know, like, or at least like many, many months. And that's just too much time in startup world. So we need to pull that measurement back to right now.

And that's where we come up with the term leading indicator of retention. this is a term that's been talked about for 20 years. I think we probably framed it at State Shoe Capital in this way. I think in sort of the B2C to B PLG ecosystems, they talk about it. was like the aha moment, even in like some consumer environments. ⁓ and what this is essentially, what can we observe of our customers experience with our product in the first month? That if we observe it.

In the long term, they'll be with us forever. And if we don't, they're a significant risk of churn. That's essentially the leading indicator of retention. And I go so far to, I haven't found that there's a universal right answer, like wow, Dow ratio, weekly active user to daily active user ratio, or like time and product, like lead, you know, there's all these different ways of measuring. We can speak about how to come up with it for you. And this is one of those cool, like creative.

elements of entrepreneurship is like you get to find this unique thing about your business that's magical. But let's talk about a framework around it. We talk about as P percent of customers do event every T time. So P percent of customers do event every T time. So now we just have to work on three variables. All right. So Slack has a famously documented example. Eighty percent of their customers send 2000 team messages every month.

Wonderful. Right, like just imagine like the early days of Slack, there's like 10 people in the room, mostly engineers and designers, and the CEO says, we did it, we're launching. The first goal is to get to a million in revenue. You can imagine like what actions occur. Higher salespeople generate tons of leads, but versus the first goal is to get 80 % of our customers to send 2000 team messages every month.

It's just such a healthier foundation of the business. And hopefully through that narrative, we understand that like how we can pull this back to measure this on a week by week, month by month basis. So we can go at startup pace. Now to your point, KK, there's this tension between maximizing revenue and maximizing customer success. This is not necessarily the same.

We certainly like, I bet if the CEO of Slack stood up and said, let's get to a million in revenue versus let's get 80 % of our customers to send 2000 T messages every month, they probably would have gotten a million dollars in revenue faster, but it's highly likely that that customer base and revenue base would not have been as healthy. And that in the former situation, they probably would have ended up with a churn rate somewhere between

20 and 40 percent. But by rooting it in the leading indicator of attention, they end up with a churn rate of five to 10 percent. So if I had to choose between getting to a million in revenue in two quarters, but ending up with a 30 percent churn rate versus getting to a million in revenue in three quarters with five percent churn rate, that's a no brainer.

the latter's better. And so it just helps us like find that trade off is like revenue growth is critical in the success measure of a business, but it has to be healthy. And we have to have the right guard rails in there to check it.

Mark (16:00)

Yeah, very, ⁓ very cool. So, okay, so when a CEO says we're missing our number and the first thing they do, CEOs, even boards, we need more leads, we need more pipeline. And you've said in the past that that's rarely the right fix. And it's often this issue is that the system isn't ready to convert the leads it already has. How do you quickly test if that's true?

Mark Roberge (16:14)

Haha. Yeah.

Mark (16:30)

And if you can give us a few examples, stories of some fast checks that you use or any founder can use that they can run this week to decide if the problem is readiness versus volume.

Mark Roberge (16:37)

Yeah.

Yeah, okay. So that progresses our discussion to the next phase of go to market fit. Okay, so what we have is like, we have a clear understanding, duh, the first thing we need to do is to get product market fit. But we have a much clearer definition of what product market fit is. I think if you go into Wikipedia and Google, know, or JackGBT, you know, product market fit, you get like a lot of like, it's just a feeling you know.

So hopefully now we've like really quantified it and we know what we need to achieve. However, when we're sitting here and it's like the third month in a row and we've closed 10 customers and nine out of 10 customers have hit their leading indicator of attention, we are calling success on product money fit. Are we ready to scale? No, because of what Mark just asked. All we've proven is that we're gonna sign up 10 customers and 90 % of them are gonna be super successful in our product.

We're not ready to add 10 salespeople because we still have a lot of questions. Like what's the process? How do we feed them? ⁓ What's the quota? What's the price of the product? I actually don't care that much about these things during the product market fit phase. I just care that these people are taking it seriously and they see success. But like now we have to figure out all these things out, like what Mark is saying around like, is it the lead flow of the process? So we call that go to market fit.

Right? like product market fit is I'm, I'm confident that when I sign up a customer, they're going to be successful. Go to market fit as I can do that profitably. Now, when we talk about profitability here, we're not talking like gap accounting profitability out of your income statement, because that accounts for like your entire business, your, your, your office, your, your C-suite. These are some of these things don't necessarily scale with revenue. We want to isolate profitability here.

to what scales with revenue and we often in our world talk about that as unit economics. So we need good unit economics. There's a lot of ways to measure unit economics. People that are listening here, you might say LTV to CAC. Lifetime value divided by customer acquisition cost greater than three. That's been a popular one for the last 20 years in SaaS. You might say payback period. How much does it cost to acquire a customer divided by how much do they pay us every month? There's burn ratio.

There's a bunch of different like you and economics. And so like, let's just talk about LTV to CAC greater than three. Technically when a salesperson joins your company, picture a 27 year old account executive joins your company. And like, what's my job? The perfect answer is to generate an LTV to CAC greater than three. That would cause a 27 year old account executives had to explode.

Like what, is that? How do I do that? So that's where we have to do the work. And we've kind of implicitly done this is we have to algebraically extract that target back to more understandable KPIs. Like how much is the contract? What's the close rate on leads? ⁓ how many, how many leads, how many meetings per month do I need to generate? Right. So that's, that's, you know, we can do that algebraically, you know, to extract it back to like, okay.

Cost per lead, number of leads, close rate on leads, et cetera, et And so that's what our go-to-market formula becomes. And now all these things become important of like, how much are we charging for this thing? ⁓ What is our sales process? Do we have a scalable demand gen channel? I don't need one during the product market phase. I do need one now. And that's really what Mark's asking about is trying to get that like math and formula down.

KK Anderson (20:29)

really what we're asking about terms of.

Mark Roberge (20:34)

⁓ So now we're like through that process, we've got three or four salespeople. We have a quota. You know, we're generating, each of them is like either each salesperson is either generating or marketing is helping or SDRs are helping, but they're ending up with like 10 new meetings a month to start off. But the close rate isn't high enough to get to their number. How do we know if it deletes or the sales? That's what Mark's asking. That's really tricky.

⁓ when you're at greater scale, it's a much easier answer. And this is an area that very few boards look at, which is individual rep performance and conversion rate. Cause if I have a team of 10 and four salespeople are constantly achieving a conversion rate of 30 % on their qualified meetings and other salespeople are converting 10%, then I know this is a sales process issue.

Now, put aside like to changes in territory and all that kind of stuff, you got to make it fair for everybody. But like that helps me understand that it's, it's some sort of lead, you know, it's a sales process issue versus if I have 10 salespeople and they all have relatively the same conversion, despite probable variances in their skill sets, then, ⁓ you know, we probably have a lead volume or quality issue. And that's where I'd look, but the bottom line is like,

You kind of attack both. know, our friend, Jaco at Winning by Design, like famously talks about like, you can do a 10 % improvement in every stage of the funnel. Like it's like, it's not like we're either going to double lead flow or double lead conversion. We, let's attack both and we're probably not going to be able to double both, but we probably can increase one by 10 % and one by the 20 % and the cumulative impact is massive.

Mark (22:31)

Incredible, incredible.

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In Part 2 of this Selling the Cloud conversation, Amy Weber joins KK Anderson and Mark Petruzzi to go deeper into how modern revenue leaders should think about AI, outreach, hiring, and coaching. Amy challenges traditional sales motions like cold outreach and rigid playbooks, and explains how AI should be used to personalize engagement, free up seller time, and enable more meaningful one on one conversations.

The discussion also dives into assessment driven hiring and coaching, unpacking why resumes are a poor predictor of success, how to identify true talent signals, and how leaders can reduce friction by understanding identity, motivation, and communication styles across their teams. This episode is a practical guide for CROs who want to build revenue teams that perform, scale, and adapt in a more human centered, AI enabled world.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why cold outreach is losing effectiveness and what CROs should prioritize instead
• How AI can personalize messaging without removing the seller’s individual voice
• The right way to define ICPs based on engagement and impact, not volume
• Why playbooks should act as flexible frameworks, not rigid rules
• How assessment driven hiring reveals true talent signals beyond resumes
• Key differences between hunter, farmer, and CSM profiles and why misalignment hurts performance
• How leaders can reduce friction between managers and sellers through better coaching and communication
• Why understanding identity, emotional resonance, and motivation matters more than process alone

Key Topics:

• AI powered personalization in sales outreach
• ICP refinement and engaged account strategies
• Freeing up seller time for high value conversations
• Assessment driven hiring and role fit
• Coaching frameworks for sales managers and leaders
• Managing conflict between sales leaders and individual contributors
• Identity based leadership and communication styles
• Positive intelligence and managing saboteurs in high performing teams

Guest Spotlight: Amy Weber

Amy Weber is a strategic advisor to growth stage and enterprise revenue teams and the founder of VEDA Sales Consulting. She specializes in aligning people, process, and purpose to drive measurable revenue outcomes. Amy works closely with CROs and executive teams to improve hiring, coaching, and leadership effectiveness using assessment driven insights and practical operating frameworks.

🎧 Listen now and follow Selling the Cloud for more conversations on building modern, revenue focused GTM teams in the age of AI.

KK Anderson (00:31)

if I could kind of double click on that a little bit, what's one of your favorite starting points? Like if you're gonna recommend to a CRO, I know it's obviously where they wanna focus, but what are just some examples of where you would have them start first?

Amy Weber (00:46)

Yeah. So I think that of the first pieces of it is that, look, I don't think cold emails work anymore. I don't think cold outreach works anymore. think it's figure out your ICP who is already engaged and then how do you automate some outreach to them in a way that makes is impactful to them. So using AI tools to be able to take that outreach and instead of a ⁓ rep,

doing what you're saying, making a thousand emails a week or a hundred calls, kind of automating that outreach, whether it's through, and maybe it's a multifaceted approach, right? Getting more information out on LinkedIn. One of the things that I hated when I worked for big companies was that they wanted, like they wanted to silence your individual voice and they wanted it all to be very static and documented. Well, then you're getting the same message over and over again.

Mark Petruzzi (01:28)

Hmm.

Amy Weber (01:34)

Using AI to take that static message, but to personalize it based upon who you're going after is a real tool and trick today. And so you're getting out in front of more people and you're getting your message out in more ways. The second part is, like I said, figuring out what your ICP is and what's impactful for them. And then leveraging those AI tools to kind of create a outreach that is not generic.

and is not just cold, it's taking the people that you know today that you want to talk to and making it more important to them, you know, in that capacity. ⁓

an understanding really kind of that the goal is to free up more time for them to meet with these individuals one-on-one. So automating the things that are getting your message out in a content personalized manner so that the AEs and leadership is getting freed up time so that they can actually engage one-on-one because look,

The other thing I think is ridiculous, again, I may get in trouble for saying it, a playbook should just be a framework. If you think there's one answer to how to be successful in sales, you're going to fail. Because you have to understand the client and their business need, and not every need is the same. It doesn't matter if you're selling the same product.

or the same service, it's how that product or service is going to impact that end user in a new way. And you can only do that if you actually get in front of them and understand what their business or challenge or issue is, how that solution is going to play.

Mark Petruzzi (03:12)

Great, well let's move to topic three, which is assessment-driven hiring and coaching. And again, something that's near and dear to AGS's heart and what we do, and we're learning a lot as we've gotten to know Amy ⁓ over the past couple months. So how should a CRO use assessment insights wisely and the most productively? Who do they need to assess?

Amy Weber (03:35)

Yes.

Mark Petruzzi (03:36)

what two to three signals matter for this role and how do those signals translate into the right interview questions and then most importantly, the coaching plan for that new hire.

Amy Weber (03:48)

Yeah, like I said, I'm a huge proponent of this because I do think we hire people or we have historically hired people based upon their resumes. That might be the worst possible thing you could ever do. Now, the resume might get you into the door to talk to the recruiter, to the team or get into the interview process, but it shouldn't be indicative of how successful you're going to be in this role. 85 % of millennials will tell you that they are in the wrong role, but they're afraid to change.

And so they're just going to keep taking jobs because that's what they did in the past. It doesn't mean that they're in the right role. And scientifically, 1 % of your past success will dictate your future success. So when we do this, we assess people in three different ways. We assess them during the interview process. So you get through the initial screening to say, ⁓ I think they might be a good fit.

What are their really, their talent signals? And you're not gonna figure that out just by interviewing them. Because so many people will interview someone and say, I think there'll be a good culture fit. I like them. I'd like to have a drink with them. Great. That means they're a good person. But are they, do they have the right skills to do the role? Right? I'm glad you like them, but are they going to fit the role? like, you know, talking about the hunter, a hunter needs to have a really high drive

and desire to go out and be with people and meet people and drive impact and outcomes. Whereas a CSM needs to have a really high precision to say that I can execute on a vision and I can track and make sure that all of the steps are going, that need to be in place for this person to, their rollout to happen in the right timeframe or their,

you know, we're engaging the right individuals from their team on a weekly or bi-weekly basis to ensure that everything is going as planned. Those are different people. so understanding those key characteristics, even your emotional resonance, how you deal ⁓ with emotions. And if somebody has, and we can test for that, if somebody has a really high ER and you put them in a hunting role,

it might take them a long time if they lose a deal to deal with the fact that they lost that deal. If they have a lower ER, they're going to be like, okay, I lost it. I can move forward to the next piece. And then we customize through the tools that we work with the interview questions to really pull out those key characteristics and those key identity markers because they're different based upon what you're looking for. From there,

Once you've hired the people and you've got your team, then you need to determine who your leader is and kind of what their core identity is and how they individually need to understand managing people. That's going to reduce the conflict. And we build out custom management plans for each of those individuals. So we say either here's your team, here's all your benefits. Here's how you should look at your team overarchingly. And then if they have specific

issues with a certain individual, whether they're like, I don't feel like I'm getting the most out of them, or we've got some sort of

conflict for the use of a better word. How do I address this? Because I really want this person to stay and be successful. We build out specific plans for them in that regard.

KK Anderson (06:58)

Yeah. Well, and kind of where my head is going is around that conflict, like what you just said. Like there is, and even kind of pivoting more toward that coaching aspect of making sure that the new hire is successful. There's very often just natural friction, especially in the sales world, right? When you have sellers who are entrepreneurial,

you get a lot of friction between sales managers and individual contributors. And like some things that come to mind are, a sales manager may, be insisting that you're multi-threading and talking to different stakeholders in a prospect where the individual contributor is like, no, I have a champion. I've got this under control. I don't want to go around them. So deal strategy, right. Or, or there might be, like communication style issues, right. Where.

Amy Weber (07:38)

Correct.

KK Anderson (07:43)

A manager is wanting to review the pipeline and have those laborious, sounds like a broken record meetings every single week. And the individual contributors like would rather just, you know, eat nails. And so like when you have, when you have this kind of friction, like what are, are some ways that you can, you know, that you help alleviate it? Like what's it, walk me through like what you would do.

you know, trying to.

Amy Weber (08:05)

Yeah. So,

like I said, number one, when I work with clients, I figure out, I do these assessments and I figure out kind of who the people are that we're working with and what their, what their identities are and then how those are impactful to each other. Right. Because you're right. Look, when you are a driver and you're going out and you've got maybe a manager that was really successful and they want you to do it the way they did it, you're going to have conflict because they have to understand that.

that ⁓ they can give an outline or framework, but that if they are trying to say, mandating that you have to do it in a certain way, you're gonna probably lose some of your top performers because those top performers are going to, they thrive in chaos. They're going to figure out the best way to work. And they do maybe have that champion and understand the relationship better. It again is going back and looking at opportunities as individuals, not as

⁓ just repeating the same process over and over again. So I figure that out and then I go in and figure out where the tension lies. Is the tension a communications issue? Is the tension a conflict of you've got two really strong opinions and so they're just butting heads? And then it's not so much about changing either one of them, but it's changing how they communicate with each other.

It's changing the language. Honestly, what we talk about in business works in parenting, right? You can have two different children that are very different people and maybe how you communicate to one is going to be different than how you communicate to the other. The same is true in the workplace. And you have to think about it from that perspective. If you've got someone who does have a really high empathy level,

and so that means they're going to take everything in more personally, then you have to address that problem or that conflict with them in a different way than somebody who has a really low one and you can say, hey, I don't like how you did that change, right? Because they're not gonna take it personal. So we go in and we try to figure out really each of those core components.

and then create frameworks for those leaders and those executive leaders accordingly so that they know based upon their core how they should address the different people on their team. And like, I don't think that you should have a team of people who are just clones of yourself. I think that diversity is important, but it's understanding how to manage that diverse environment and where based upon that diversity.

you may sometimes falter. We learn as much from our failures or maybe more than we do from our successes. And so if we fall down with somebody, we need to figure out how to pick it back up. And that's just educating ourselves on who we are and who those people are as well. I'm a huge proponent of positive intelligence. I don't know if you know anything about that. Positive intelligence, it's a book, it's been a course.

And it says that all of us have ⁓ our saboteurs and, you know, high achiever. Everybody's got the judge and it's trying to figure out how you get to your sage. And that's what we try to coach people on is that it is okay to be hard charging, but understand that you need to take that pause before you just treat everybody the same way.

understand who you're talking to before you make that comment. That works, by the way, with your clients as well.

So it's just a framework and figuring out where to go and what it's signaling. And then like I said, you also may determine that you just have the wrong people in the wrong roles, be that the individual contributor or the leader.

Mark Petruzzi (11:27)

Yeah, very good stuff. Cool, all right, well let's move into our final segment here and that is our rapid fire. So real quickly, first product or service you ever sold.

Amy Weber (11:38)

long distance and you can put an asterisk there for anyone under a certain age to tell them what that means.

Mark Petruzzi (11:42)

Exactly.

KK Anderson (11:43)

Like

long distance phones, like services.

Amy Weber (11:44)

Yep,

door to door to evaluate people's ⁓ long distance bill and sell them on a lower cost solution. It was hilarious and it was really good at it and it was probably I had no.

Yes, long distance for businesses. It did.

KK Anderson (12:03)

It started you on your career in sales, that's for sure.

Yeah. Okay. So who is a, like a chief revenue officer or a CEO that you love to follow?

Amy Weber (12:11)

I follow several, lots of them, and some people I've worked for in the past and other people. When I sit down and think about it, there's a few that come to mind. Like, think Mark Cuban is phenomenally interesting to listen to, just the way that he drives companies forward and as a CEO and his mindset and the fact that he is very open to giving his opinion. I'm going to mess up his name, but Satya Nadella at Microsoft, I think is really fascinating today because he

He has taken a very different approach. worked for Microsoft and trust me, he is a very different leader than the leaders I had when I was there, because I think he looks at it from a people perspective. Alicia Tillman at Delta, she's more of a CMO, but she's taken a real people approach as well. So I think her conversation is interesting. And then there's a guy now that's the CEO of a water company that is very active on social media. name is Jay Williams.

And he kills me because a lot of what he puts out there is not related to business at all, but he is increasing his following and his brand in such a creative way. I mean, it's water and people are engaging with him at huge rates. you know, I was in Nashville recently and it's kind of like what the guys at Liquid Death did.

KK Anderson (13:26)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (13:26)

Excellent. All right, one leadership habit more sales leaders should practice.

KK Anderson (13:30)

What a great conversation.

Mark Petruzzi (13:32)

Excellent, thank you again, Amy.

KK Anderson (13:34)

All right, and thanks to our amazing audience.

Mark Petruzzi (13:36)

Of course.

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In this episode of Selling the Cloud, Mark and KK sit down with Amy Weber, founder of Vetta Sales Consulting and strategic advisor to GrowthStage and Enterprise revenue teams. Amy specializes in aligning people, process, and purpose so strategy translates into real performance. She shares why many revenue organizations stall not because of tools or plans, but because of role confusion, misaligned talent, and leadership gaps.

Amy breaks down how to design roles that reflect reality, how to hire and coach based on true behavioral identity, and why companies must stop promoting top reps into leadership without assessing desire and capability. She also explains how AI can power a stronger customer experience by removing low value tasks and freeing sellers to focus on discovery, executive access, and relationship building.

This conversation hits the core of modern revenue growth: the right people in the right roles, operating in a healthy, human selling system.

What You’ll Learn:

• The three fastest tells that your people or role design are broken
• How to distinguish hunters, farmers, and CSMs without relying on personality stereotypes
• Why top performers burn out in “Frankenstein” job descriptions
• How to test for core sales behaviors using identity based assessment
• Why leadership is not a reward and should not be given based on quota attainment
• How AI can support human selling by automating research, follow up, and content prep
• How to create operating rhythms that ensure AI actually frees time, not adds more dashboards

Key Topics:

• Role design and talent fit for revenue teams
• Behavioral identity vs personality in hiring
• Misaligned promotions and the manager IC divide
• Why customer success is undervalued and misunderstood
• Modern client experience and relationship driven selling
• Practical, tool agnostic ways to use AI for research and personalization
• Operating cadence changes that make AI adoption real
• Avoiding analysis paralysis when implementing new technologies

Guest Spotlight: Amy Weber

Amy Weber is the founder of Vetta Sales Consulting and an advisor to high growth revenue organizations. She helps CROs and CEOs fix the people's side of revenue through role clarity, talent fit, and leadership development. Her work replaces outdated activity goals with clear rhythms and systems that actually change behavior, increase productivity, and create healthier teams. Amy also advises organizations building AI for talent decisions.

Resources and Mentions:

• Cisco sales story on customer experience
• Medium content repurposing with LLMs
• Talent identity and psychometric assessments
• Operating rhythms for revenue teams
• Relationship led selling frameworks

🎧 Listen now and follow Selling the Cloud for more GTM insights from leaders driving the future of revenue. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Mark Petruzzi (00:31)

Welcome to Selling the Cloud podcast. Today we're joined by Amy Weber, a strategic advisor to GrowthState, Stage and Enterprise Revenue teams and the founder of VEDA Sales Consulting. Amy's work centers on aligning people, process and purpose. So strategy turns into the most powerful performance. She's known for helping CROs fix the people side of revenue, writing roles that match reality, hiring for fit.

not just overall pedigree, and coaching managers to run simple weekly systems that actually change behavior and drive the highest level of productivity. Amy Kevin Lee serves as a strategic advisor to organizations building useful AI for people decisions. And she's led transformations that replaced the old fashioned ad hoc activity goals with clear operating rhythms.

This allows there to be a freeing up of more human time for discovery, executive access, and relationship building. Her lens is tool agnostic and outcomes first. What should change on Monday morning and how do we start measuring it? We'll cover three topics today. People and with the focus on them being greater than tools, roles, fit, and real leadership.

Why growth stalls when the wrong people sit in the wrong roles, and how leaders create clarity and accountability. AI plus a strong experience culture, freeing time for human selling, using AI to take low value work off the team's plate so sellers could spend more time with customers, and assessment-driven hiring and coaching, really tool agnostic but practical ways to use talent

data to hire coach and fix manager IC friction without turning it into a tech commercial. So most people who know us and are on this ⁓ podcast with us every week know that's all things that are near and dear to KK and my heart and to what we do at AGS as well. So in another way, we're bringing an opportunity to get a...

a different perspective or another perspective, but I think we're going to agree on a lot of things here based on the stuff we know about Amy already. So Amy, thank you so much for joining us and welcome to Selling the Cloud.

Amy Weber (02:43)

Thank you both. really appreciate it and I'm looking forward to the conversation today.

Mark Petruzzi (02:46)

Excellent. Cool. So first question, lots of teams have the right strategy and plenty of software, but the people role fit isn't right and results off install. As a CRO, what are the three fastest tells that role design or fit is the real problem and that it's not the plan or the overall tech as well?

Amy Weber (03:04)

Yeah, it's great because everybody steps back and they're like, what tool can I put in place? What new playbook can I roll out? What's our strategy? But they forget about the fact that the number one thing that they need to determine is do we have the right people in place and are we managing them correctly? So number one is, are your top performers miserable? Are they out there driving sales, but they are updating their LinkedIn? They're telling you that they're unhappy. They show up and they are on Monday mornings.

you can just see that the energy is drained out of them. Because they're driven individuals, they're going to go out and they're high achievers, they're going to go focus on success, but you can just see that they're deflated. So number one, top performers are just absolutely miserable. You the second thing I see is that you see the same mistakes over and over again. You're providing individual or team coaching. You're giving a...

guidance, you're rolling the playbook out, but you're seeing that the mistakes are just compounding. That's just repeating themselves. And then really the third one is we're promoting people incorrectly. So promotions are causing problems. I tell people that leadership is not a reward, it's a responsibility. So we're taking top sales performers. We're like, oh my God, they killed it. They were 300 % of their number again, and they've made club every year. So we're going to make them the manager.

a director. And they may be a phenomenal sales individual, but they have both not the desire nor the actual skills to lead a team. And that desire component is really important. You could be the best sales rep in the world, but really not have the desire to want to manage, train, create empathy, you know, in other situations. So for me, those are the three glaring ones that I see that when I go into organizations, I'm like,

They say we can't grow or we're stagnant or we've got a lot of they say culture problems. It's it's not culture. It's people you people problems

KK Anderson (04:56)

That's so interesting. what we see with our clients and sales organizations is that the quote unquote job description for the sales roles, I mean, they're conflicting. You've got this mandate to go out and hunt and prospect and build new business, must hunt. And yet they need to be also an account manager and running projects and programs and keeping the relationship of the...

keeping everybody happy, right? And then, you know, some of them are also part-time analysts. And so it's just like a lot of conflicting roles. And I think that probably leads to what you described with that burnout almost, right?

Amy Weber (05:37)

Exactly.

I call those Frankenstein job descriptions because they're like, I want a self-starter who's a good collaborator. And I'm like, what? You know, I need somebody who's going to really go out and drive revenue and has the executive relationship that's good at doing the research. OK, well.

KK Anderson (05:41)

Yes.

Mark Petruzzi (05:46)

Ha!

Amy Weber (05:54)

They're just, they're putting together these, what they think the requirements are and they really need to hire for the key components of what they're looking for. A hunter role is different than a farmer role. A customer success manager, and sadly we see that get cut from companies all the time. It is cheaper to maintain a good client than it is to find a new one. And I could repeat that over and over again, but people don't understand it. And they're like, well, they,

Accounting executives as Hunter can be the CSM as well. You know what? They probably don't have the right skills because a good CSM is going to be somebody who really wants to be a collaborator, can hide behind the scenes, is very detail oriented, likes to follow a process, right? A good salesperson thrives in chaos. There's somebody who goes out and can just drive opportunities because they're listening to the business needs.

and they can kind of pivot and determine how to pitch the right solution, but they're not following a step one, step two, step three mentality that a good CSM really needs to do. That's why I don't think, and I get in trouble all the time, and I'm going to say it and just throw it out there. Most SDRs are not salespeople and should not report to sales. SDRs are operations people. They are good at following a script and setting an appointment, but they're not doing the key core

KK Anderson (06:53)

Right.

Amy Weber (07:10)

attributes of sales, is listening to the business problem and creating a solution.

KK Anderson (07:14)

Right. So I follow up on that real quick though. So once we get those kind of roles rewritten and we figure out like what are the real core behaviors as you said, that that job demands, do you have any tricks on how to like test for those behaviors in interviews and specifically, know, a hunter, right? It's a very hard role to hire for. And they may think, for example, that

Mark Petruzzi (07:15)

Great.

KK Anderson (07:38)

because this person is an extrovert that they're gonna be really good at picking up the phone and making connections and calling people, not necessarily true. So talk to our audience, if you will, a little bit about how do you like kind test for behaviors.

Amy Weber (07:50)

so

I actually do test and I leverage psychometric analysis tools in that regard to really determine people's core identities. So the irony is this, look, I've been in these roles 30 plus years now, which I like to tell people that means I was 12 when I started because I sadly do not want to acknowledge how much older I've gotten. But ⁓ we took this personality test from the time I was in college.

KK Anderson (08:07)

That's right. You were.

Amy Weber (08:16)

and your personality changes as you grow and as you meet new people and things, but your core identity doesn't. So somebody who is a self-starter should really have a high drive of influence. And there are specific questions that you can ask during an interview and or a promotion stage and or as a sales leader to determine if they have that true drive, right? If somebody is saying, talking about the influence that they have or that they

that they've had in a deal or with a specific executive, you know that they're a high influence type individual ⁓ versus someone who says, work really well and I like when people bring ideas and I like to brainstorm those and I like to work in a group to determine that. That is not somebody who's going to go out and be impactful from an influence perspective. They're going to be good at working behind the scenes. Someone who's a good influence person is going to kind of

be a strategic thinker and then you need those people with the lower influence to implement that strategic vision. The same is true on like, I don't care if they're an introvert or an extrovert. Some of my favorite people I know are incredible introverts that can turn on that extroversion because they're passionate about the solution or the product or the service that they're providing. But once they've done that, then they...

they'd master that Irish goodbye, they can just leave. They don't like that small talk or that networking where, it doesn't matter. You don't have to be that extrovert, but there are, there are solutions, there are tests that you can take that really get to the core of who you are. And then there are interview questions that we coach people on asking to really understand kind of where they are from a influence, sociability, consistency and precision perspective.

Mark Petruzzi (09:35)

Ha ha.

Amy Weber (09:56)

to model out who makes sense in these different roles. Like I said, I had a young lady who worked for me. She was fabulous. And her previous leader was like, I would fire her. And I'm like, okay. So I interviewed her and when I was bringing her onto the team and I laughed because they had her a ⁓ hunting role. She was a farmer. She was very precise. She was very good at maintaining clients and getting them to buy new products.

She did not like the aspect of going out and building new relationships every day. She wanted to take a relationship and grow it. That is a farmer versus a hunter. And you have to understand as a company, what are you really looking for and where are you putting those people? And then coaching them and managing them per their identities versus everybody's the same.

Mark Petruzzi (10:40)

Amy, those are all great insights and I'm going to bring us back to a point you made earlier where you were saying how, there's all these companies that are cutting customer success and the value and the cost of driving a new deal, finding a new one, hunting a new one versus the concept of just, you know, keeping clients, keeping them happy, keeping them expanding.

I've always, I am always saying that to my clients as well. And there's a couple thoughts I have behind that. And in the first book that I wrote, Selling the Cloud, I have a whole chapter around how in general, I believe women are better sales reps and sales leaders than men on average. That's just the nurturing.

Amy Weber (11:07)

Mm-hmm.

Mark Petruzzi (11:25)

perspective, the empathy connection, all those things are so valuable. Even grit, I think women have more grit on average than most men I know, including myself. So with that in mind, this concept of like hunting being more valuable than farming or customer success is something I fight about every day. And I think it's a bit of a machismo type of mindset that we all know.

most CROs or sales leaders over the last 20, 30 years are men, not women. And luckily and thankfully, that's changing. But when we look at that concept, it all kind of comes down, guess, this. Nobody celebrates the person who comes back with a, a bucket of fruit or nuts and something they just cultivated and brought back into a village.

but the person who has a deer or some other animal on their shoulders and they're carrying it back, they get a big celebration when that happens. So how do you think you change that mindset when it really comes down to it? How do you make companies just understand that it doesn't matter. A dollar of revenue is a dollar of revenue.

Amy Weber (12:34)

Yeah, you know, I've got a specific story I'll tell you. Back when I was a young sales rep, I walked into an account, literally walked into it. The receptionist wasn't there and I just wanted to figure out what the company was doing. I'd never heard of them. And I met the CEO. Luckily, he didn't just pitch me out of the office, which he could have because I was well.

I had inappropriately entered their building. And I ended up having this great conversation with him. He's still a friend of mine to this day, so I think it's hilarious because I just walked in and knocked on his door and I said, hey, what do you do here? And when he got done laughing at me, he's like, how did you get here? And I said, well, no one was at the front desk. But the long and the short of the story is that they were a growing company and they were a small business when I first met them and they are now a massive provider of technology.

Mark Petruzzi (12:54)

Yeah.

KK Anderson (12:54)

That's

my thing.

Mark Petruzzi (13:05)

you

Amy Weber (13:16)

and he's no longer the CEO there, but across the country, across North America. And they said, I was working for Cisco at the time and they're like, you're too big, you're too expensive, we won't need you. And I said, okay, that's your opinion, but really I just wanna hear what you do. And they appreciated kind of the fact that I just wanted to learn. So they invited me into a technical meeting. Long story short, they had zero Cisco when I took them on.

When I left Cisco all those years later, they went from zero to 95 % of their footprint was in our product. they, whereas they were never going to spend any money on us, 95%. And it was because we listened to them and we helped them determine ways in which they could leverage the technology. They became a reference of look out. They were a multimillion dollar customer for us. Right. When I left Cisco and I was no longer the rep at that time, I had moved into leadership and other aspects.

But I had stayed engaged with them. People did not keep that relationship going. And they moved off of all of that platform. So they went from zero to 95 to back to almost nothing again, because I had built the relationship, I had listened to them, but I had supported them not just when we needed a PO. I had supported them when they were growing or they had ideas and we went and talked. It wasn't about just

celebrating their success when they were spending money with us, it was helping them figure out what their plan was for the future. And that's why I say the number one skill in sales is listening. And then it's that customer engagement. I'm kind of, you know, I talk to people about, getting back to that point where that client experience is going to be the key. And whether you are a retailer or a

technology company or a restaurant. I was down in Miami for a holiday weekend recently and we went to this fabulous restaurant and it was a Michelin star place and they could only seat 16 people at one time. And you're having this curated prefix menu experience. And I whisper basically to my significant other, I'm a little chilly. And within seconds, cashmere pashmina was draped over my shoulders.

That is a client experience. I never said a word. And that is what we need to take to our companies, that idea that when we're talking to them, that we understand their needs, even if it's just that they're cold. Right? And so it's really just taking that step back and figuring out kind of what we need. And what we need is client customer experience to go out and ensure

the client is continually taking care of. We need the account type reps that aren't out for the big kill, that they're not looking for the next elephant, but that they understand that they can take their current client and continuously grow them. And then you still need the hunters that are gonna go out and find new business.

KK Anderson (16:00)

So I love that story. And it's actually the perfect segue into our next topic, talking about AI and really kind of this customer experience culture that you're talking about. And what you described, is just so human. And that is the human part of selling that will never be replaced by AI.

Right? It will never, it will never be replaced. Now that said, that's, that's what's critical. And you're right. and we talk about this a lot on our podcast. The pendulum has swung from everything being process heavy tool, heavy, you know, send 5,000 emails a day, make 100 calls a day, being able to use technology to just,

increased productivity, even if it's not productive, right? Or effective, all the way back to, wait a second, people buy from people they trust and relationships are what matter. And Mark, maybe that's why women tend to be so effective in sales roles because that's paramount, you know, in our hearts and in our minds is that relationship like you described.

Amy Weber (16:53)

Correct.

KK Anderson (17:06)

Knowing and appreciating and 1000 % agreeing that the relationship and the human activities and the experience are paramount. How can a salesperson use AI for the other things? Like what are some things, specific tasks that they can do that you've seen your customer or clients doing to give them the time to have that human experience?

Amy Weber (17:23)

Yeah. ⁓

Yeah, it's great questions and all of that I agree with as well, right? I think that one of it is ⁓ that research and account prep. I don't want a rep to ever go into a meeting that they don't know the answer to the questions that they're asking, right? They should have done, there's so much information out there, but instead of them spending time, I mean, I remember being a young rep reading when it was a publicly traded company, I was reading the financial reports. And thankfully I have a degree that

taught me how to do that, but a lot of people don't, right? And so using AI to do that research and that account prep to really build out kind of a portfolio and the tools are so good at that and kind of reaching out across all the different platforms, know, is the person you're meeting with, are they active on LinkedIn or socials or are there blog posts? What's interesting? So that you build that connection. So that's one. And then being able to take that information and

personalize the content that you're sending back to them. Whether it's the communication from you speaking to them, whether it's the emails that you're sending, whether it's you you see an interesting article that you think would be good for them, that content personalization. And then post meeting intelligence work. So being able to automate all of that. So that you're not spending time doing the mundane tasks of the follow-up.

and those repetitive outreach type solutions, automating that through AI and having that process put into place. One of my clients is actually, they've ⁓ got an individual that has been writing on Medium for like the last 11 years. And so his voice is really interesting. And he is, instead of him continually having to write and post because he's really busy,

they're now using, they built in their, LLM to be able to go out and kind of pull segments from what he said in the past so that they can then automate it to repost it on the social channels in different ways. And that's fascinating because you're taking his intellectual property and AI and you're putting it together. So his voice is still being heard, but in smaller bite-sized pieces. So there's a lot of really different.

cool ways to leverage AI that what it's then going to do is free up time for me to be out in front of the customer more. I think we spent a number of years back in front of the video camera like we are now. I think that now we are pivoting back to, we want to be out in front of the customers and clients and talking to them one-on-one and listening and understanding and engaging in group discussions and all of that. And AI will free up our time to be able to do that.

because it's going to just take away those repetitive tasks that we don't need to be handling or doing. The tools will do that for us so that we can get back to the real interaction of the human engagement.

Mark Petruzzi (20:14)

Good stuff, Amy. ⁓ Teams say that we use AI, but at the end of the day, nothing really changes in our calendar. What weekly operating changes, cadences, coaching, or metrics ensure AI actually creates more customer time, more selling time, and not just a lot more dashboards or new processes?

Amy Weber (20:35)

Yeah, analysis paralysis is kind of the mindset that comes to me, right? That they just keep linking on additional tools and instead of thinking, how is this providing benefit to the teams or to the organization? So I like to think of it as stop trying to boil the ocean, pick one tool that's going to make a difference, implement that, and then move on from there. So have a plan.

If there's multiple tools that you want to engage or that you think might be good and you're testing them, pick the one that you think is the most impactful first, deploy it, and then execute based upon that tool, right? Automate one task out of the gate instead of all the tasks. And then measure the time savings that you're getting from that tool, not just how many people in the organization are using it. we tend to, organizations are like,

I've got a 50 or 75 % adoption rate into this tool. But is the tool really giving the people back more time or is it just another tool that they're using, right? Then layer in the next piece of automation and analyze that behavior and just follow that routine. Because that's how you're going to determine, am I really getting any results from this versus just investing in multiple tools and multiple components.

So it's stop trying to boil the ocean, pick one thing, focus on it, do that well, and then move to the next step.

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In this episode of Selling the Cloud, Drew Sechrist, CEO and co-founder of Connect the Dots and longtime Salesforce veteran, joins Mark Petruzzi and KK Anderson to unpack what it really means to build a relationship intelligence layer that changes how your team goes to market.

Drew shares why his own career win stories at Salesforce led him to build Connect the Dots, and how mapping real relationship strength can turn stalled enterprise deals into closed revenue. He breaks down the nuance of activating networks at scale, aligning incentives around introductions, and embedding relationship data directly into the existing workflow so new processes do not die on the vine. From Monday pipeline reviews to executive access and stuck late stage opportunities, Drew explains how the best revenue teams treat relationship intelligence like the air they breathe.

What You’ll Learn:

• Relationship Intelligence Fundamentals: What it really means to build a relationship intelligence layer and why it is a different go to market motion than cold outbound.
• Incentives and Activation: Why simply seeing who knows whom is only half the game and how incentive alignment, compensation, and context determine whether relationships actually get activated.
• Workflow, Not Side Quest: Practical ways to embed relationship data in tools like Salesforce, Slack, and email so managers naturally coach around it in pipeline reviews.
• From Story to Playbook: How one trusted introduction at Salesforce unlocked a seven figure deal and how that kind of magic can be turned into a repeatable team playbook.
• Modern Deal Strategy: How to use relationship maps and heat maps to unblock late stage deals stuck with finance, legal, or executive signoff instead of just hoping the contract gets approved.

Key Topics:

• Building a relationship intelligence layer for GTM and revenue teams
• The nuance of relationship activation and incentive alignment
• Where relationship intelligence should live in the RevOps and sales tech stack
• Using Salesforce embedded views, alerts, and APIs instead of forcing new UI and heavy change management
• Designing Monday pipeline reviews that start with “who do we know” and “have we connected the dots”
• Why LinkedIn connections alone are noisy and how signal based relationship scoring changes the game
• Moving from manual “who knows who” exercises to scalable, AI powered relationship mapping

Guest Spotlight: Drew Sechrist

Drew Sechrist is the CEO and co founder of Connect the Dots and a former Salesforce executive who rose through the ranks during the company’s hyper growth era. His experience closing large, relationship driven enterprise deals at Salesforce inspired him to build a platform that operationalizes the power of real networks for modern revenue teams. Today, Drew helps companies turn hidden relationship capital into measurable improvements in win rates, cycle times, and deal size.

Resources and Mentions:

• Company: Connect the Dots
• Concept: Relationship intelligence and relationship heat maps for GTM
• Book: The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
• Platform Ecosystem: Salesforce, Slack, email, and RevOps systems as primary surfaces for relationship data

🎧 Listen now and follow Selling the Cloud for more GTM, sales leadership, and AI driven revenue insights from leading voices in enterprise growth. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

KK Anderson (00:31)

And this really feeds into our second topic, which is around building that kind of relationship intelligence layer. What you've been describing, right? That is, it really is a different approach to like, to go into market. And so like, and if you think about like, let's say we do, you do this 90 day plan, it's working, like your team is,

show this team that you're piloting this with is showing success. You build kind of the playbook and the process for how you could repeat it or scale it. Does this become something then that your managers start coaching? Does your pipeline meeting sound differently? What happens then?

Drew Sechrist (01:08)

Absolutely. So do anything except use our network to go to market. That's it. That's all we do. I can't actually say it's entirely true. It's like we do some events. We'll go out. I was at Dreamforce last week. We hosted the Salesforce alumni reunion. So we do things like that. But that's also kind of relationship based as well. But we don't do anything else. So we're kind of like this purist in this new motion.

So the answer is absolutely yes. But I will say we don't have it all figured out yet. We have some of it figured out. The challenge, think, is really like.

The challenge is a lot about protocol. Protocol and aligning incentives for everybody. Just because you can see everybody that knows everybody in the world and how well. Just imagine there's some magic way for you to see everybody that we collectively as a company know and all the people that they know and how well they know them so that we could say, great, Mark's got this really strong, looks like he's got a strong relationship with the CEO of this.

Fortune 500 companies, let's leverage Mark to get to that person. How do you do that? Like it depends on, there's a lot of nuance. Who is Mark? Is Mark one of our senior executives? Is Mark an investor? Is he an advisor? Is he just a friend from the gym? Is he my neighbor? What are his incentives aligned with us? Is he a customer of ours? You know, like all of this.

those things play into the, how do we activate Mark's relationship with this person? Just because we can see that it exists. That's, that's like, call it 50 % of game. But then the other 50 % of game is how do we actually activate this in a way that Mark feels good about that's going to be effective. That's going to, know, he's going to facilitate the introduction. one of the big challenges I think on this is like, the incentive alignment thing, like, let's just talk about compensation here.

Let's talk about compensation for a moment, if I can take it that direction. If you really want to unlock the network, then everybody's got to be compensated somehow. Now, I don't want to be too capitalistic about this. I don't want to be too capitalistic because many moons ago when I was starting my career at Salesforce, it was around that time.

I read Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point. you've read it, KK. Mark, have you read that? Yeah. So deep in our brains, right? And I definitely identify it as a connector, even at that young age. And I was like, I'm a connector, and I love this. And so no surprise that years later, I started Connect the Dots. And I do make connections for,

Mark Petruzzi (03:09)

I certainly have,

Drew Sechrist (03:25)

Many like Matt, vast majority of the connections that I facilitate in my life are not, I'm not expecting any kind of, know, compensation for that. let's say certainly not any monetary compensation. might like, would, I might like, Hey, thanks a lot, Drew. That was really nice. You helped me out a lot here by introducing me to this person. I like that. makes me feel good. So.

But if you want to do this at scale, you got to figure out like, what is the compensation that everybody's in the network is going to have? and it could be straight up, just, you feel good doing it. Like I'm a connector and I do feel good doing it. KK, if you wanted to get to get to somebody, let's say, totally random idea. Like you're, you're going to go to Dublin and that came up and you're like, I really wish I knew great.

whatever pubs in this little town outside of Dublin, cause that's where I'm going to be. like, you know what? know somebody from that town. Let me introduce you to, I'd feel good. You go to some cool pub and have a great time. And that person that I connected you to probably would be like, yeah, that's kind of neat. Somebody's going to my town. And so my compensation on that one is, you know, it's, basically, it's a dopamine hit. I feel good that I've connected to people and their lives are going to be a little bit better because of that connection. But KK, if you hit me up like.

40 times a day, every day for introductions to various people, for various reasons. At some point I'll break and I'll be like, KK, I got a day job, I'm sorry. You know, like I can't help you with, you know, 40 introductions a day. Now, if you hit me up with 40 at and say, Drew, I'd like you to make 40 introductions a day for me. And these are the introductions I'd like you to make. And it's good for the person that you introduced me to.

And by the way, Drew, for every introduction that you make, I'm going to give you $10,000. I'd be like, hmm, all right, KK, you only want 40 a day? you like 50 a day? Would like 60 a day? I'll see what I can do. Right? So incentive alignment and compensation are important here, it's so nuanced. mean, think about it. Like, you're getting paid to make an introduction to somebody, you're a friend. That doesn't feel...

KK Anderson (04:58)

Yeah, or 400. Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (04:59)

Yeah

Drew Sechrist (05:14)

Right? Does it? You know, it feels, that feels wrong. Like if, he's, if KK you say, Hey, Drew, could you introduce me to one of your friends who is a good prospect for us? And if they buy, or even if they don't buy, I'm going to give you a thousand dollars or something like that. then I don't know. just, it feels weird. that feels weird. Now, if I were an advisor for your company, KK, you're CEO of company and

You say, Drew, it looks like you've got a great network into the companies that we want to sell to. would you be an advisor for us? We're going give you some equity and we'd like some advice from you. We'd like you to open some doors for us so that we can get in and sell our product and get feedback and grow and become a successful customer. That doesn't feel bad in the same way as getting paid with cash, right? so there's a ton of nuance here.

Candidly, we don't have it all figured out yet. I think this is like this whole space is taking shape right now. It's like there are tools that are making it possible to leverage networks at scale like never before, but you got to figure out how to, how to activate those relationships and make everybody feel good about it and also incentivize.

KK Anderson (06:05)

Yeah.

What's old is new. Relationships are old as time and here we are, right?

Drew Sechrist (06:14)

Mm.

Mark Petruzzi (06:17)

Yeah, so that makes perfect sense. this is, I love where this discussion is going. So let's just analyze a little bit. So everything we're talking about for most companies is a new process. And the adoption of new processes, they typically die if you can't get it into the core workflow. So how do you build this in? Like where should relationship intelligence live in the overall

stack and the overall rev-up and what you're doing there so that you don't need to drive any heavy change management in this process. So what's the latest weight setup that still moves the needle that you work with your clients on?

Drew Sechrist (06:54)

Yeah.

Yeah, that's a great question. I think it should be kind of like the air you breathe. It's everywhere. So whenever you're in any place that you would need this information, it should just be there and you shouldn't have to go look for it. So for example, our customers have access to us inside of Salesforce. Not everybody wants to use Salesforce, if you're using Salesforce, then you're looking at an account or contact. We have our

relationship, your relationship data visible to you inside of Salesforce. So as you're doing your account planning, now sales managers are saying, okay, did we connect the dots? Literally, they'll say that and they'll look and be like, well, why didn't we use this contact here? So we have our board member knows the CMO has a strong relationship with the CMO at this company. Have we connected the dots there yet? And if the answer is no, then you just click the button and you initiate that request.

And it gets routed through, however, it should get routed, it might get routed through your CEO to, the CMO of that company or whatever. so that's, that's one, other places that people work or Slack, either email, getting notified via email that you've got a relationship that you should be leveraging for a deal that you're working on. We do that. we also, we're launching an API shortly where your rev ops team will be able to put the data anywhere that you want.

whatever that is, if you have a list in sales law for outreach or you've got some other single pane of glass that is the thing that you look at to figure out what's your next action with your target accounts, ConnectedOuts can just be one of the pieces of data that's on there that says, hey, don't be stupid here. Don't try to go cold into this account. You can get a direct introduction from

You know your VP of finance who knows their CFO. And so just do that initiate that. So I think that the best way is not to have any new UI. We do have a UI that's no are tool as a UI, but I think the best way to do this is just not have any UI at all and just be where be wherever the users are already working.

KK Anderson (08:48)

makes a lot of sense and that sounds, that would be amazing, right? Gosh, this time has flown by so fast. I'm gonna move us along to the third topic and I'm afraid we're gonna run out of time. But let's talk about stories and playbooks and how we can turn some of these connections into outcomes. so I love a little story time. So like what jumps right out at you when you think about kind of a,

a story where a relationship, changed the game and because of a relationship, because of a connection, then boom, an intro was made, like some magic happened and like what changed because of that? Cycle time, win rate, deal size, like give me a story.

Drew Sechrist (09:27)

Yeah. one story, one story was, from, early days at Salesforce we hired in, there's a really important relationship I made in my life was with my new boss who came in then was named Jim Steele. So that was probably 2004, if I recall correctly. And I just saw Jim at Dreamforce this week, caught up a little bit. Mark made Jim interview with a lot of people before Mark Benioff hired Jim Steele.

And I was one of those people. so I love Jim at that point. I love Jim today. it was such a great decision to hire him. So I gave him, thumbs up, to Mark and then Jim, saw later in the hallways, like drew, I you gave me the thumbs up. Thanks so much. What can I do to repay you? And I was like, Jim, I'm so glad you asked that. And then I pulled up a, like, here's my list of accounts. These are my, this is my territory. Who do you know at these accounts?

Mark Petruzzi (09:55)

Mm.

Thank

Drew Sechrist (10:11)

That's how you can repay me. And, we found, I won't name the names, but we found there's a large semiconductor company there that he had a friend at who was a very senior executive C level exec. and he's like, I know this guy right here. and I said, great, let's see if we can get in. So Jim picked up the phone, called him and we were in that senior executive's office the next week. Now I had been trying to crack into that account.

I don't know, for the years, I don't know, for some long period of time, completely unsuccessfully. And then here we are sitting in the C-level executive's office, you down in the peninsula in San Francisco. And, and then, they had a conversation and I was kind of flying the wall and, know, I, basically was the errand boy on that. And I took all the follow-up notes and knew what we we had agreed to do next. And, but those two kind of, discussed everything

And there was a high level of trust between them because they'd both worked together for long time in the past. and next thing you know, a couple of months later, we closed a very large transaction. I think it was a seven figure transaction. And, that was amazing. It was totally transformative and like blew out my number for that year. And it was a deal that would not have happened just zero percent chance that that would have happened. And that, and I wouldn't say it happened a lot for me.

But it happened enough where I definitely, at some point I'm like, am I any good or am I just lucky that I'm surrounded by these people that have these relationships? And then I was like, what? I really want to be good, I want to be master of my craft, but I could also just continue to be unlucky and this is okay too. And the commission checks still cash. so that is,

Mark Petruzzi (11:27)

you

Drew Sechrist (11:40)

a big part of the reason why I decided to go start this company, Connect the Dots, because that magic is out there. It's just waiting there. It's just hidden. You can't see it, right? And if you can just see that that relationship exists, then you can manifest.

KK Anderson (11:47)

my goodness.

You are best equipped

to help the person you once were and those experiences that provided you that unlock is what you're helping others to achieve.

Drew Sechrist (11:58)

Yeah.

Yeah, by

the way, thanks if you're listening, Jim Steele, thank you so much.

Mark Petruzzi (12:06)

Well, that's interesting. So next time I speak with Jim, I'm going to have to see if you have given him his 5 % of the equity of Connect4Dots because that sounds like exactly when you came up with the initial idea here one way or another.

Drew Sechrist (12:20)

Yeah.

Jim made plenty of money from all the deals that we closed together. He's fine. That guy's totally fine.

Mark Petruzzi (12:28)

That's true. Yeah, and Jim wouldn't want it. So no, that's really

cool. Okay, so let's make this even more real. Let's go even deeper. So, let's say it's our Monday pipeline review in an enterprise SaaS company. And we've got all these late stage deals stuck with finance, lots of middle stage activity, and we need more executive access. what should we do?

right after that, how do we make that happen? And what are the top three actions you'd put in motion right away when you're at that point? I'm sure you do every quarter with your own company.

Drew Sechrist (13:04)

Yeah, I'm sorry that you're just like giving me these layups about connect the dots, connect the dots. That's this company. I mean, the thing we do all day, every day is, is at every stage of our sales process, we are looking to connect the dots. that was, know, David, David Nitsky from, from Salesforce came up with that phrase back in the day, connect the dots meant, okay, who do we know at this company? How do we get into this company?

Mark Petruzzi (13:08)

No, and that's exactly where this one's gonna go, I know that.

Drew Sechrist (13:29)

How do we get hired in this company? And we basically built the tools like our dream tool for solving this problem. The problem is, we can't get in everywhere. doesn't, it doesn't work in every situation. You cannot assume that you always have an in at every company and, to be able to get to every executive, through your relationships. But it's definitely the first thing you should check. Cause if it exists, then that's it. That's your, that's your Trump card. Good play.

Right now, play it immediately. Boom. ⁓ So, you know, first thing we do is we check to see if we know anybody and our heat map of the relationships is connect the dots. So we can, and we'll go into, we can go into Salesforce and see, do we have any relationships via our network and our network to sort of clear is it's all of our employees. You can see all of them are bored, our investors, our advisors, all of our customers happen to be on connected. That says you may.

Be aware because they're using connect the dots. So we can see through all of those networks, anybody that knows anybody and all of those scored relationships. So if a deal stuck and you're at two weeks out from the end of the quarter and you've got a champion, but you've never gotten to that C level executive that is ultimately going to sign off on it. And by the way, we do this all the time. It's like happening today in the background right now. we're seeing, okay, Hey, we actually.

have this former colleague who is now on the board of this company. And they're on the board. So they know the CEO who's going to be the ultimate decision maker on this this deal. Send them a text message. And just ask them, this is in, it's with your chief. It's with the chief legal officer of your company. It's almost done with red lines. It's going to be on the desk of your CEO for decision. Could we get your voice of support on this?

Or could you introduce us to the CEO so we can have that conversation? And if you don't have those relationships, all you're doing is twiddling your thumbs and hoping that like, I don't know, when it gets on the desk of the CEO, they're going to say yes and sign it versus no for some reason. So that is what I recommend you do. You need to have that relationship map. We're not the only thing in the world that does this. We're the thing that does it the best.

So, and if you're not using Austin, at the very least use LinkedIn. You

Mark Petruzzi (15:28)

you can see that, I've signed up about a month ago. I've been in the system. I was in it again last night and today. And yeah, it's a lot from LinkedIn, but it just makes the whole process move even more productively.

Drew Sechrist (15:43)

we didn't really talk about exactly what it is connected. That's does. So I should maybe I should say just real briefly what we do when a when a company turns on connect the dots, they plug connected out into their email server. Then we analyze all of the historical email across every email account that they've got. And we look at the metadata and we score the relationships of all the people that they have. So if they've emailed with anybody,

ever, and it doesn't matter what job they were, we analyze that and we build a score for each person. And anybody who's outside the company that's already using Connected Outs, which is a lot of people now, so like, a lot of VCs are on it, a lot of PE firms are on it, your investors, your advisors, you see who they know. They've done the same thing. They've analyzed all their networks. So all you're sharing with each other is who I know and how well I know that person.

But that's it. That's it. And it's super powerful. So what you get is now instead of with like LinkedIn, you just get this binary result. Like Mark and Drew are connected on LinkedIn or they're not. And in that world, you can't really navigate and figure out like, can I leverage Mark to get to this person or not? Cause the failure rate is so high on LinkedIn. There's such a high noise to signal ratio. And that's the complete difference on connect the dots and connect the dots. You can laser target and I can see

just the people that Mark has a strong relationship with and never bug him about the other 95%, right? Just the 5 % that he really knows well. And what that does is you scale it across a large organization. That means that you really now have a heat map that gets you directly to the people you want to get to. So that's why you can do it the old fashioned way. You can use LinkedIn. can also, the really old fashioned way at Salesforce was just asking your colleagues around, like, hey, did

KK Anderson (17:19)

Who

do you know at this company?

Drew Sechrist (17:20)

Yeah, holding

up the list. That's I've been in a super old fashioned way. So there's like, you know, V zero, there's V one, you know, and now we're on, CTD is like V eight or whatever. don't know. but whatever you do figure, figure it out. Like you do need to connect the dots somehow. and you can do it manually or you can deploy technology to do it, but that is definitely the hack right now. And that is in a, in a very noisy world where there are too many messages from too many people that you don't know.

KK Anderson (17:46)

Mmm.

Drew Sechrist (17:47)

Basically, the answer is to all that stuff. You just delete everything right? The things you don't delete are if it's Mark sending me an email. I know Mark. I'm going read it. That's it.

KK Anderson (17:56)

It's so true.

Mark Petruzzi (17:56)

Yeah, and you know what, we're running towards the end of our time here and we don't wanna ask for any more of your precious time, Drew, than we already started with. But here's an idea. Would you be open to doing a LinkedIn live session with us where we go just a very deep dive into topic four and really talk about with all your great sales and sales leadership experience.

how you're leveraging AI into everything, your product, your processes, your company.

Drew Sechrist (18:26)

Yeah, I'd love to do it. Count me in.

Mark Petruzzi (18:28)

Yeah,

KK Anderson (18:28)

And that will

be.

Mark Petruzzi (18:28)

I think that would be great as well. And then we'll do our rapid fire then as well. So we're not gonna share that rapid fire with you and give you all this time to prepare, because we wanna really see your reactions to it.

Drew Sechrist (18:38)

Beginner's mind. All

right, beginner's mind, I'm cultivating it right now. I will go into a deep meditative state until we have our LinkedIn live session.

Mark Petruzzi (18:48)

no better way to prepare. So Drew, thank you again. Thank you for taking the time with us. I think this was great. And we're really looking forward to diving into this next topic with you as well. And I'm sure our audience will be as well.

Drew Sechrist (19:01)

Likewise, Mark. Thank you so much, Mark. KK, a lot of fun.

KK Anderson (19:01)

All right, thank you, Drew.

Mark Petruzzi (19:04)

Awesome. 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, Mark Petruzzi and KK Anderson sit down with Drew Sechrist, CEO and co founder of Connect The Dots and longtime Salesforce veteran, to unpack why traditional ABM motions and high volume outbound are running out of gas and what comes next. Drew shares how relationship intelligence, warm introductions, and network aware playbooks are giving revenue teams a durable performance edge over cold, volume driven tactics.

Drawing from his experience leading enterprise teams at Salesforce and now building Connect The Dots, Drew explains how to operationalize real relationships at scale, how to reimagine the role of the account executive as CEO of the territory, and why senior sellers should lead the shift from spray and pray to relationship driven go to market.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why ABM has reached peak utility and where it still fits in a modern go to market motion

• How relationship intelligence and warm paths consistently outperform cold outbound and one to many ABM

• Why the best enterprise sellers behave like CEOs of their territories and how that model broke during the growth at all costs era

• How to design KPIs that expose when your current motion is tapped out and ready for a relationship first rethink

• A practical 90 day approach to shifting from volume based SDR motions to relationship driven plays led by senior sellers

Key Topics:

• The limits of high volume ABM and cold outbound as primary growth levers

• Mapping networks, scoring relationship strength, and surfacing warm paths into target accounts

• Dreamforce era relationship building and how those habits still drive enterprise deals

• The return of the account executive as CEO of the territory, not just a cog in the sales tech machine

• Using AI and systems like Connect The Dots to make relationship based selling scalable and measurable

• Reweighting your go to market mix across ABM, intent, and relationships instead of relying on mass spray and pray

• How SDRs evolve into behind the scenes orchestrators of introductions, routing requests through executives and board members without breaking trust

Guest Spotlight: Drew Sechrist

Drew Sechrist is the CEO and co founder of Connect The Dots, a relationship intelligence platform that helps go to market teams tap into the power of real relationships at scale. Before founding Connect The Dots, Drew spent more than a decade at Salesforce during its hyper growth era, rising from one of the first account executives to leading enterprise sales teams. His career has been built on leveraging networks, warm introductions, and trusted relationships to win complex, high value deals.

Resources and Mentions:

• Company: Connect The Dots

• Event: Dreamforce

• Topics discussed: account executives as CEOs of their territories, relationship driven GTM, shifting off pure volume motions

🎧 Listen now and follow Selling the Cloud for more conversations on modern go to market, revenue leadership, and the future of relationship driven selling in an AI enabled world. 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.

In this episode of Selling the Cloud, Paul Fuller, Chief Revenue Officer at Membrain, joins KK Anderson and Mark Petruzzi for a compelling conversation on how modern sales leaders can use AI to coach more effectively, eliminate wasteful pipeline rituals, and build real self-leadership within their teams.

Paul outlines how high-performing sales managers are shifting from performative metrics to meaningful enablement; using AI to flag risk, generate insights, and equip reps to close complex deals. He also shares how sales leaders can establish operating rhythms, drive accountability, and lead with trust; all while reporting to the board with metrics that prove the business value of relationships.

What You’ll Learn:

• AI-Enhanced Coaching: How to pair red/yellow flag systems with AI insights to pinpoint stalled deals and coach with precisio
• Cadence of Accountability: How to replace unproductive pipeline calls with actionable, written commitments that build trust and execution
• Manager Enablement: Why coaching the coach is the next evolution in sales performance systems
• Board-Ready Metrics: Which numbers matter most to prove relationships and strategic selling actually move the needle
• Practical AI Use Cases: Where AI drives effectiveness now (e.g., summarization, follow-up, personalization), and where it still falls short

Key Topics:

• Operationalizing AI in pipeline reviews and deal strategy
• Moving from activity tracking to outcome coaching
• Systems for continuous manager development
• Real intelligence vs. performative sales theater
• CRO priorities in the AI era: focus, trust, proof
• Enabling full-cycle reps with better content, follow-up, and insights
• Measuring relationship impact: customer engagement, strategic touches, lifetime value

Guest Spotlight: Paul Fuller

Paul Fuller is Chief Revenue Officer at Membrain, where he brings structure, strategy, and coaching to complex B2B sales organizations. A strong advocate for elevating leadership and execution within sales teams, Paul focuses on embedding process, insights, and AI into daily workflows to help reps and managers improve continuously.

Resources & Mentions:

• Company: Membrain

• Book Recommendations:

– The Greatest Sales Question Ever Asked by Brent Long

– A Mind for Sales by Mark Hunter

– The Speed of Trust by Stephen M.R. Covey

– Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

• Sales leader to follow: Matt Green (Sales Assembly)

🎧 Listen now and follow Selling the Cloud for more real conversations with revenue leaders building tomorrow’s go-to-market playbooks.

KK Anderson (00:31)

So building on that, Paul, from a sales manager's perspective, let's say they're in a coaching call with the rep and there's deal after deal that's stalled. And we know that stalled deals kill quarters, right? And so what are some ways you see top sales leaders leveraging AI?

or AI signals, to help coach through some of those common challenges that sellers have.

Paul Fuller (00:55)

we personally, do it by, coaches that managers that use our system and, are doing, but we have a really robust flagging system and a really robust ability to, look at a pipeline by a variety of factors.

then you can start to layer the AI in top of it. So we've built a flagging system for years. So something has been in stage more than 15 days. Let's check this out. Let's understand it. Let's, let's figure out and based on the profile of the customer and the actions that we've taken, red, yellow, red, yellow, let's categorize those flags. where you start to get into the AI stuff is that AI can then start to deliver based on that framework, very specific things based on

to other reps that have been successful and move things based on situations that have happened across the organization and based on that rep behavior itself. If you do things like tie in, tie in recordings and fathom and gong and those types of things. So you can do some really cool work there. What I found is it's best for the flags and the AI to bring up suggestions to a manager saying, Hey, here is three

three or four deals ⁓ that are specifically, let's talk these through, right? Bring up those flags. I do believe a hundred percent that it is on the manager then to dive in into those deals, understand them and human to human get that coaching on what are the barriers that are, are specifically in the way and how we're then improving.

the skills, the who and the who of what we want to be and how we want to act. How are we improving that on ongoing basis? So we have a platform called Elevate within our tool set that is a, it's a cadence to coaching and cadence rhythm platform. So it ensures that we're doing the right work. we can set goals in that platform. It can bring insights from our pipeline. It can flag deals that we need to discuss.

But if we don't actually have the meeting, I'm still a huge fan of that. Like we have to have those one-on-ones and dive in, discover and understand. And so for the sales manager, the most important thing data is about half of it. The other half of it as a sales manager is how am I improving as a leader in my ability to coach these deals? And they need to have a cadence on those. need to understand how

Cause information is not the, we need the information and we need to have it highlighted. But if there's not a rhythm by which you're continuing to improve your coaching skills and ability and dive into deals and those types of things, the sales manager, doesn't matter how much information I give them. because the sales manager in that, that is coaching a lot of times, we'll just do the same things over and over again. It's a man.

why aren't you closing this? I would have closed it. that's a lot of the coaching that happened that happens today. Well, I would have done this. And that doesn't that doesn't cut it. So I think that that layer of those sales managers and those coaches really need to work on that skill.

Mark Petruzzi (03:44)

Right on. So Paul, let's kind of anchor this maybe around like a mini cadence. So if we're reviewing pipeline for 12 weeks at a client, you if you're doing it within your CRO role for your own company, what are the three weekly review items and the three actions that you'd mandate and who owns each and when do they need to be done?

which are the ones that really drive behavior to become sticky?

Paul Fuller (04:14)

That's a great question. Do I have to limit it to three?

Mark Petruzzi (04:16)

You do not.

Paul Fuller (04:18)

All right. Well, again, I can only go from my experience.

And, this is weird because we've been talking so much about, the who and the, core of the people that we need to become and those types of things. and then the processes, and I am going to give you an answer that I think is completely outside of that. and it's a very simple answer that I think doesn't happen, across just about everyone.

I've seen there needs to be and I don't care what system you're using. don't care if you're using Excel. I don't care if you're using a membrane. I don't care if you're using a pad and paper, but on a weekly basis, every rep and every manager of that rep needs to have a full understanding and picture of an updated pipeline and the deals in those pipeline in that pipeline.

And, again, our system makes this easy. makes it much more, much easier and gives the ability to do it, and flags and pulls information out of it and all that stuff. But that habit in and of itself on a weekly basis for a sales manager, is something that is skipped so often and it changes everything. second.

is the cadence of, if you have that, then you can effectively coach and have a cadence and rhythm to that. And I call it a cadence of accountability. The cadence of accountability is just as important to the sales manager as it is to the sales person, as it is to the VP of sales, as it is to the CEO, right? It is.

What are we committing to this week that we're going to get done for each other? And that goes back. It does go back to that who like self leadership and the ability to be a self leader, but that cadence of accountability is critical and it needs to be written down. It just, it just has to, Hey rep one, I'm a sales manager. I am going to dive in and review through your accounts and I'm going to do this for you.

Okay, and I'll do it by Friday or I'll do it by next Tuesday.

Do you know how you're in sales? So you know this and you're in leadership and coaching and you know this is that how frequently that gets missed and pushed to the side and in favor of busyness is, is crushing. It's crushing to a sales team. It's crushing to a sales leader and it's crushing to a forecast ultimately. All right. And the third thing that a sales, I would say that's incredibly, incredibly important.

And again, we, going back to the basis, you could do this on a pad and paper is, what are the things that I am accountable to my prospects and customers for this week? My top five, right? And in, and I might, I'm going to complete those. I think just those three things, absolutely.

It's why I harp so much on, the self leadership and I, what I call the real intelligence, the leadership, the service, the way if I have accepted and we've defined that together, those three things don't become necessarily easier, but they become something that I will commit to, as, a person and as a manager and as a sales team member. and they become so, so important. And so again,

Our systems, everything is a glorified system around that, quite frankly, but those things are so incredibly important to make an impact and to move forward together, lead well, serve well, and to really ⁓ drive performance.

Mark Petruzzi (07:28)

Yeah, and you know what's really cool, Paul, about what you just walked us through is you really define what the items that are really important in the selling process as compared to things that we have done for so long. For example, we've relied on a CRM and we all know a CRM doesn't do anything to make a sales rep more effective or even more productive.

And so, okay, so we spent a lot of time with a CRM process and we all know that most of the data is just really not good within CRM systems. That's a whole nother discussion for another time. But if you look at the, even things like a pipeline, what amazes me is some of the clients that I work with, when I first get in there, they love that weekly pipeline meeting and it can be an hour, many of them are an hour and a half.

A few of them I've seen are two hours by the time they're done every week, just sharing all this mumbo jumbo jumbo and also just manipulation that sales reps end up doing because it's a good way to do it. So when you could put a process together in the ways that you're describing it, that takes a lot of that out of the equation. And by the way, the business KK and I run, AGS,

We're moving with some products that will allow you not even to have a pipeline call each week because the information is shared so closely and who knows, maybe some of those products we work with are good fits to coordinate and integrate with some of the great things you're doing with membrane. But you really hit me on some key items there.

Paul Fuller (09:02)

Yeah.

Yeah, we don't have a pipeline call every week. which is fascinating. If I think about it, I do have a sales team meeting every week, but it's not a pipeline call. mean, pipeline is an individual that the reason people have pipeline calls generally is, I hate to say it. it's performative at this point and

Mark Petruzzi (09:10)

Mm-hmm.

Paul Fuller (09:21)

that really is it like performing, but it's more for the manager than it is for the salespeople. It's like, and, so I have a call. I took a format from one of our partners. it's a, we call it unpack, but it's updates and I do ask for short numbers, but I can look at the number because our CRM is actually clean.

And actually we have a process that's built into it that understand and the sales reps agree helps them close deals. They use that process. Sometimes they get outside of the process, which is fine. They can call audibles. It's, fine, but they use that process to actually work their deals towards success. And so I don't need to have a long call where everybody's talking about their, their pipeline and individual deals and doing it in front of each other.

Instead, we can start to have discussions about, what are some things that you're doing that is helping you improve your win rate? What are some things? How can I help you? And, we have discussions like that and in our number eight and then I, could say, Hey, this is what I'm really seeing in membrane. This is what the numbers are showing me. Is that true? Like, are you guys feeling that as a true, is it, how can I help you get those up?

So the two hour performative pipeline call where you're forced to come in and a rep is forced to, to essentially embellish. Cause that's what they do. They want to look good in front of their, their team members. I don't, I don't need that. What I can have is a, is we can start to have just a mature discussion. Cause we've agreed that we're going to be self leaders and leaders in the organization. And we have a process by which to do that. And we can, we can talk about what's actually going on.

Mark Petruzzi (10:38)

Yeah.

Paul Fuller (10:52)

but I do trust, they have to have, there is no question like it has to be updated. That is just a habit. Like if we're going to provide this and we're going to provide this system that helps you close deals more effectively, it does have to be. And there are some things that I do need as a manager to update, but most of this is for you, Mr. Mastrip. So, you're dead on with that, right?

Mark Petruzzi (10:58)

Yeah.

Paul Fuller (11:13)

How do we drive effectiveness, not performative nonsense?

KK Anderson (11:18)

So Paul, I'm to take us into our final topic around focus, trust, and proof, right? Specifically from the lens of a CRO having to report up to a board of directors. And let's just start with, there are so many CROs right now that are beginning to invest in AI. Some organizations are further ahead than others, but

I would say nobody wants to be left behind, right? And so if you're like, what advice would you give to your fellow CROs that are out there? Let's say they are just starting to kind of dip their toe in the AI water and they're gonna have to go to their board and ask for funding. And we know they're gonna fund what they can, boards are gonna fund what they can measure. So like in this era, what would your advice be to them on where to start?

And later on, you would, some of these concepts of real intelligence, because that's really what AI, as we've talked about in this episode, allows us to do is to focus on the real which is the relationships and the trust and whatnot. So where would you tell a CRO to start in their journey?

Paul Fuller (12:20)

The greatest help that I've found so far, and let's talk about this in the concept and I won't talk about it necessarily from a concept of a CRO. If I can narrow that concept to almost a VP of sales in B2B sales.

because I don't want to jump to the marketing side right now. I, cause there's a lot of stuff that I would, I think is really important. AI does extremely well there. So if you don't mind, I'll narrow the focus and on what we've been really talking about, which is it's the best thing that I've seen it do. And where we're heavily investing and investing on behalf of our clients as well.

is summarization of data and taking things out of a manual taking things that can be taken out of a manual workflow and more effectively done by AI and so very specific examples of that. mean, call recording came in early, the fathoms came in early. I think what a wonderful tool, right? So how do you

But how do you take that data and then systemize it in a way that you can say, ⁓ man, I am going to be able to give my reps back three hours after a really good call to systemize this and to improve followup and improve communication. Right. Amazing. It helps them be more accountable. It helps them drive better, better outcomes with, with reps.

I love it. It's so good. where I would, I have struggled with this one as a, as a CRO is things like the prospecting, things like AI prospecting and those types of things. Cause I get so inundated with things that I guarantee that I know. and I've not seen anybody do it well. so

KK Anderson (13:48)

is based on the prospect.

you

Paul Fuller (14:00)

I struggle with that piece and I'm still figuring that out. But I know the piece, emails, LinkedIn, everything. It's just the prospecting side of AI. People have sprinted towards that. Like they have really sprinted towards that side and how are we going to make that happen? And I have not I sprinted towards how I can make my full cycle reps more effective.

KK Anderson (14:03)

You mean inundated

Paul Fuller (14:23)

in what they're doing now to drive impact for the customer and the prospect. Like if I can have AI helped me make a conversation more effective and give me a better chance of winning that deal, I'm going to do it. And that's where I've been really heavily investing and looking. I don't think, and this is just a me thing.

AI has a big place in the prospecting and that type of stuff. just, the operationalization of it has not worked well yet. in, a lot of when it's completely responsible for creating the message, getting it out, trying to get a meeting, doing all those things. I have not put, and it's partially also cause of how we operate as a business. like I have a partner network.

That's how I get most of our leads in. I love our partners. I love how they operate. So they connect and they drive leads to us. So I haven't had to look as closely. but that, that would be where I would highlight, just there's been massive enhancements in empowering a good full cycle rep that understands how to sell. it's just so helpful.

to drive improved output, help with notes, help with proposals, help with all those. It's so good.

Mark Petruzzi (15:28)

So Paul, so boards typically fund what they can measure. And we touched on that before, know, just when you were driving how these, how do you prove these items that we just were discussing to a board, to a CFO, to a CEO. So they typically fund what they can measure. How do we go about and prove that relationships matter in this?

Like what three numbers should be on page one of a board book that defines like example cycle time with or versus worth without a warm sponsor or executive meeting rate by stage when we lift on strong familiar paths and how do you can define that versus you know other processes and paths that get developed along the way as well.

And what targets do you focus on to make sure that you can convince the board and the executive team that this overall program that we're discussing here today works and is more productive and effective?

Paul Fuller (16:27)

Wonderful question. I wish I had them all laid out for you in a specific presentation and could give you the one, two, three, four. That's a magic formula. Unfortunately, I can't. Fortunately, I can't. I tend to...

I tend to look at history and our historical metrics so I can look at what our future metrics could be. So if I'm looking at ARR and I'm looking at customer lifetime value and I can then see, you know, what is it, what is the number of touches and strategic touches that we need to have with a customer to increase our, lifetime value of a customer and how we're doing that and what is the level of,

operation we need to have with them. So you can measure that in number of different ways, meetings per customer, conversations per customer, strategy sessions per customer, customer engagement with support, those type of things. If I can start to look at those and then I can say, what is, what is our average rate for a really good growth? And then I can say, what can AI actually help me cut down on the human element, but increase the actual strategic impact? That's really helpful.

I'm sure there's a VC term for that or VC stat on that, that I don't know. but that is really, really, and I think they call it replacement to those types of things, but, that is a measure incredibly impactful. And so it's really, do we, we have the same level of service or increased level of service that will help us increase the lifetime value. and

What do we need to invest to make that happen? Cause I already, we have proven models for this. We have proven models for this and what our people have done on an ongoing basis and what other people, know, and the type of things that we need to create that work well. I'll give you an example. I just had a meeting yesterday with a guy that I thought was ridiculously good. and it, he was selling to me and he,

he created a marketing strategy document for me in 15 minutes. after we had, a structured, a structured call that he recorded on Fathom, after he used AI to research our, our market and, and the things that were out there, he had set up a couple of, agents to do that. And then he delivered me a document. He said, and how he said it, he's like, this is not going to be perfect.

This is our starting point, but, and, here you go. Right. But it was, it was customized. It was me. It used my language and it was incredible. Right. Like in terms of the sales process, like I really loved that. So that to me is an enablement piece that I could help my reps be more effective in market by delivering more effective materials that are customized to a person. And I know I need to do those types of strategic documents regardless. Right. They just,

in our type of complex sale, need to do that type of work. hopefully that's helpful.

Mark Petruzzi (18:56)

Now that very much was and let's finish up We only have a minute or two here more and we want to make sure we don't keep with you past our committed time So we're gonna do an extremely rapid fire segment here. We're gonna try to do this in about 40 seconds So we love the rapid fire segment That's why we really want to make sure we still do this with you Paul So first question first product service you ever sold

KK Anderson (18:57)

it's

you

Paul Fuller (19:22)

Printing door to door in Arizona in the Tucson summer heat.

Mark Petruzzi (19:27)

⁓ I was hoping you were going to say maybe Flagstaff in the summer, not Tucson in the summer. But that's a tough one.

KK Anderson (19:35)

Paul, who is a CRO or a CEO that you love to follow?

Paul Fuller (19:39)

Matt Green from Sales Assembly.

KK Anderson (19:41)

So look them up.

Mark Petruzzi (19:41)

So what,

yeah, we definitely will. One leadership habit that more sales leaders should practice.

Paul Fuller (19:48)

self-accountability.

Mark Petruzzi (19:48)

be

KK Anderson (19:51)

My favorite question, advice that you would give to your 21 year old self.

Paul Fuller (19:54)

motions lie.

KK Anderson (19:55)

There's a story there, huh?

Paul Fuller (19:57)

and cut back on the drink. Partying is not the way.

Mark Petruzzi (20:01)

Alcohol is not the way, right? Yeah, it's kind of hard to avoid in college, isn't it? Okay, favorite sales marketing book.

Paul Fuller (20:03)

Yeah.

there's a new one out. It's called the greatest sales question ever asked by Brent Long. Amazing. I need to throw out two other shout outs here cause I do love a mind for sales by Mark Hunter and then, the speed of trust by Steven and Mara, Covey is, just, I, it's life changing book for me.

Mark Petruzzi (20:23)

Yeah, I'm two for three with those books, but I've got a new one here with the Brent Long one. That's great.

Paul Fuller (20:28)

All right, yeah, great book, great book.

KK Anderson (20:31)

Okay, and what about your favorite non-business book?

Paul Fuller (20:33)

Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. ⁓ C.S. Lewis is my favorite author in everything he's written. It just blows me away.

KK Anderson (20:43)

That's awesome. Okay, well Paul, thank you so much. We had so much fun chatting with you today and we've all learned a lot.

Paul Fuller (20:48)

Thank you for having me on. Hopefully I wasn't too long-winded and if I was, cut it out.

Mark Petruzzi (20:53)

No,

KK Anderson (20:54)

You are awesome.

Mark Petruzzi (20:55)

you were great.

Beautiful. Thank you to our wonderful audience and everyone out there listening.

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, Paul Fuller, Chief Revenue Officer at Membrane, joins KK Anderson and Mark Petruzzi to reframe how revenue teams win in complex, multi-stakeholder deals. Paul explains why many orgs over index on apps and one-off skills while under investing in operating rhythms, leadership habits, and relationship-driven execution. He introduces the idea of real intelligence as the who and why that guide the how, and shows how process plus AI inside the workflow can coach managers, focus reps, and change what happens every Monday morning.

What You’ll Learn:

• Defining real intelligence: moving beyond tools to leadership, service, and wayfinding
• Building operating rhythms: weekly coaching, clean pipelines, and a cadence of accountability
• Embedding insights in the workflow: checklists that coach, not just boxes to tick
• Activating AI where it matters: individualized multi-stakeholder follow ups and manager signals
• Proving what boards fund: focusing on measurable behaviors that move win rate and cycle time

Key Topics:

• Systems over one-off training for durable behavior change
• Process plus AI to guide day-to-day actions in CRM
• Coaching frameworks that reinforce who, why, then how
• Multi-threading effectively and right-sizing stakeholder engagement
• From performative pipeline calls to meaningful operating reviews

Guest Spotlight: Paul Fuller

Paul is the Chief Revenue Officer at Membrane. He helps complex sales organizations operationalize process, coaching, and buyer-centric execution so managers can coach and reps can execute without bouncing across tools.

Resources & Mentions:

• Fathom and Gong for call capture and summarization
• Membrane workflow checklists and coaching cadence
• WINS framework for servant leadership based selling
• Books: The Greatest Sales Question Ever Asked by Brent Long; A Mind for Sales by Mark Hunter; The Speed of Trust by Stephen M. R. Covey
• Leader to follow: Matt Green of Sales Assembly

🎧 Listen now and follow Selling the Cloud for more GTM insights from enterprise operators and CROs. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Mark Petruzzi (00:31)

Today on Selling the Cloud, we're joined by Paul Fuller, Chief Revenue Officer at Membrane. Paul spent years helping complex sales organization operationalize process and coaching, bringing structure to multi-stakeholder deals while keeping sellers focused on what moves outcomes. At Membrane, he's championed approach that layers insights and prescriptive guidance inside the workflow so managers can coach and reps can execute.

KK Anderson (00:40)

you

Mark Petruzzi (01:00)

without bouncing across tabs. We'll dig into Paul's thesis on real intelligence, the durable leadership practices that operate, rhythm sales teams need to thrive amid AI tool bloat and rising partner competition. We have three topics we'd like to cover with you today. From skills to real intelligence, why systems, leadership habits and operating rhythms be one-off training.

Process plus AI, kind of day-to-day actions, putting insights inside the workflow so reps and managers change what they do on Monday morning and every single day of the week. Focus, trust, and proof. Leading in the AI era, keeping teams competent, and proving to the board, CFO, CEO, that relationships and systems move the numbers. Welcome, Paul. We're so happy to have you with us here today.

Paul Fuller (01:50)

Thanks so much for having me. really appreciate being here. I'm pumped. I'm excited.

Mark Petruzzi (01:55)

Beautiful. We love it, All right. Let me open with a question here in topic one. So Paul, you've argued that revenue orgs over index on apps and one-off skills while under investing in the systems and leadership habits that drive outcomes. In your words, what is real intelligence for a sales org? And how is it different from adding another tool or another skill module?

Paul Fuller (02:17)

Yeah, great question. And I think you've, everybody's been there. in terms of we love in the sales world to focus on the how, And how do we get things done more efficiently and quicker and better and put more numbers on a rep and make sure that they get, things done more appropriately. Like

The whole revolution of the past 25 years has focused on that. Let's, make sales and manufacturing line. Let's get an SDR. Let's get to an AE to an AE that does, another thing at a sales engineer to the next, to the next, to the next, right? How do we make this more efficient? there's, there's an interesting concept though, that I I'm really finding that more and more as we, today's world and what we're dealing with.

is we have skipped some certain things. We have skipped some of the fundamentals that it takes us to operate as sales professionals as a human and really make a continual impact in the market. We have skipped things and pushed them to the side. Things like relationships, things like how we work on those relationships together, things like a long-term

a relationship that is going to drive impact for your business for years to come instead of, and instead in much of what we focused on, have you gotten a conversation and is there an opportunity? So when I talk about real intelligence and building that into a company, I'm focusing more on the who we want to choose to be. And then the why that we choose to be this instead of, and then move into the how. And I think that focuses on three things that we choose to be in sales.

how we choose to lead, how we choose to serve. And I have a word that it's wayfinding, but how we choose to problem solve and find a way to work with companies and, do that core to who we are and define the, make those choices about who we want to be in those actions. We can always figure out the how another app, another thing. and

So many of us just focus on that. How let's just, my gosh, I got this, I got this for data. got this for this scraping. got this for this. And you focus on that so much that you've seen tech bloat. You've seen confused reps. You've seen reps promoted to AEs that just cause they know how to book a meeting, but they couldn't, they couldn't discover and ask a question for the life of them. Or they don't even know who they are and what a sales motion is. So that's what I.

Mean when I'm talking about real intelligence.

KK Anderson (04:27)

So the real intelligence as my daughter would call it is like the invisible thread, right? That connects everything. It is the common denominator that must be there to be able to make a sale. And that's a true relation. It's a human-based relationship. that what I'm hearing?

Paul Fuller (04:45)

Yeah. Amen. and let's make it real with like one word that you hear a lot in sales today and you hear people throwing up their hands about accountability, right? I can't get my reps to be accountable to leadership or customers. And so how did most people solve that? Well, I'm going to throw, I'm going to throw test management at this. Right. I'm going to throw check boxes that they have to do in their CRM. I'm going to throw.

And they think that's solving the problem. Well, the problem lies much deeper than that. Yeah, the problem is much deeper than that, right? The problem is that you haven't invested in your team and built leaders on your team that know how to lead themselves and lead others. So why don't you start? Why don't we start with core components of self leadership as a team and say, that's how we want to sell and what that means to us before we then create this in the line thing wall and

KK Anderson (05:10)

another box to click.

Paul Fuller (05:33)

of accountability, because you have so many see I was on a CRO forum the other day and they're like, I just can't get these Gen Z errs or whatever to be accountable. Well, quite frankly, look at the system they've grown up in look at a lot of things that has happened. I think you need to go back to the real intelligence part of this. Let's talk about what it means we want to hire leaders, have leaders in our culture and what that looks like for us here. Let's start there and how that can impact your life.

Therefore, you know, so you start a little earlier in the cycle, get rid of that. You do the how, but start with the who.

KK Anderson (05:57)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (06:03)

So Paul, where do teams get stuck in this? What's kind of a common anti-pattern? Something that looks smart, feels good, shiny AI, but doesn't translate into consistent behavioral change.

Paul Fuller (06:17)

well, I'll use, we, are heavily, we love sales process. I love sales process. I actually really appreciate, our, platform is built around sales process, and how we're able to do that. sales process is a wonderful thing. and, let's say it's created in the mind of, the sales process is created in the mind of the medic expert that knows everything and has been.

been in there for 30 years and knows exactly the questions to ask and all of those things, right? And then I put that out there and I put it into an organization. I find out, why isn't this working? It should be. I mean, we had an expert design it. it was perfect. It's in a system, right? There are gaps in the people I think don't see where they say, okay, let's fundamentally go back to this. And I put this concept of real intelligence, but

let's go back to these fundamentals of leadership there that are embedded into it. Let's agree on those and gain agreement for our team that that's what we're to practice. And then let's look at that in the context of a sales process. What are the actions that we're going to do continually and how is that going to, how are we going to craft reminders of that initial who that initial agreement, who do we want to be? Right? How do we're going to craft those in the sales process that actually helps us execute?

cause if we have our who and our why figured out our how, we can systemize that really well. Right. So I think people get stuck in the anti thing is, well, I'm just going to put it in a sales process. Okay. If, if you just do that, you're going to get a bump. You're not going to optimize unless you have a complete and total agreement and, and, and focus and help people drive their core and, their understanding of why they're doing this and helping them and coaching them to do that.

then you can execute on the how really well.

KK Anderson (07:50)

Sorry, are you saying then that where people get stuck is that they are skipping stages of the sales process or accelerating faster or skipping critical pieces of it and that's why their deals are stalling or, you know.

Paul Fuller (08:05)

No, I'm

saying they're skipping stages. I think we're skipping stages and expectations a lot of times in our sales team themselves. And so for example, I was just talking to somebody last week and they're like, well, I hire really good salespeople. Right?

that's what I do. And so I don't, I hire good salespeople. I have this process here that's helpful forum and I asked them to follow the sales process, but I asked them to, I hire good salespeople and I just count on them. And, and it's like, great, that is a wonderful step. They can do that. But I, the, the core thing is then, how, but how are you empowering them to be the best salespeople out there? Well, I really don't. I hire the, I hire the best ones and I let them run.

now I think there's a, there's a step there and that is missed, which is all your hiring. You're hiring really good salespeople, but the step is how are you, how are you working with them, coaching them and helping them develop things that we know are core to continually get better. their leadership and account, their self leadership and accountability, right? Back at the ability, how they serve people, how they

how they help people find what it is they need, right? Those are not things that are necessarily natural to everybody. And even the best salespeople need that help. So how are you continually helping them do that? And then how are you helping put things into the how, into the process that remind them of that activity, of the things that they need to do to be at the top of their game?

And so that's really what I'm talking about. I think a lot of times we skip the step we, and we skip it far too often. We expect too much of things like new hires or especially new college grads that are coming in young sales reps that they understand concepts that are inherent to sales leadership service and wayfinding. we don't even give them, we throw them into a ⁓ niche role and we never pay attention to that. And I think it's time that we shift that, especially with AI, cause AI can do a lot of the how now.

I can do a lot of research for us. And so we need to develop the things and the skills and the leadership service, the way finding on that side, much more impactfully to scale a good relational organization.

Mark Petruzzi (10:05)

Right on Paul. So give us a quick before after story where shifting from train to skill to build the system plus leadership habit materially change win rate cycle time and or forecast accuracy

Paul Fuller (10:20)

Yeah. I have one, that's a very recent one that we've been working with it. We have a partner, that we work with and he dives in and he very specifically focuses on a servant leadership based, who, right? Who we are is, servant leaders. They define that's how they define sales. And then once you decide that and, and figure out, okay. And then each individual is figure out why they're coaching.

or why they're selling, which is more of an individual goal. He was able to put in a process and framework. So he's got a framework that he calls wins. And it's an amazing framework. That's how we're going to have these conversations, how we're going to do this continually, how we're going to lead, serve and way find as a, as a team. And then that framework then led into the specific sales processes themselves. So this is the order of operations that we want to follow.

Right. Just by doing that work, but doing the hard work first on defining, who we want to be, how we want to lead, how we want to sell, what sales is. Right. And getting that hard work done first that is often skipped. but by doing that in, then putting in the processes of the framework and the processes afterwards, he's able to see, I think the stats on the recent case study or something like a 20 % increase in pipeline development.

Quality conversations has gone up with all the reps. So qualification is massive. So pipeline flow through is incredible because they're qualifying more effectively from a place of confidence in who they are and what they can do. and so I will pull up the specific stats for you, but it's been tremendous. And so we do this through our platform. Like he implements a part of this in our platform. but the core of it, it becomes way before that platform.

Right? It's, really deciding on who we want to be and the core elements of the, call it again, the real intelligence assets that we want to dive in, how we want to up or who we want to be and why we want to operate as a team. Is that helpful?

KK Anderson (12:10)

I think this is going to take us into our second topic, right? Around process and AI and how it impacts day-to-day actions. And so I know you love process. I believe one of the reasons you love it is because you also believe that this real intelligence is insights. they have to live where the reps work. Like it has to be in the workflow.

in the CRM in membrane. And so on a Monday morning, what does an AE actually see? how does this real intelligence show up?

Paul Fuller (12:40)

Yeah, great question. So membrane itself is we love process because again, process helps us do the job that we have, we can do to the best of our ability. That's, that's what it is. It's consistently it's a checkbox, right? now let's tie this in. Before I answer that question, I'm going to use an analogy, if you don't mind. I'm going to tie it to the medical profession,

KK Anderson (12:50)

consistently. Right.

Paul Fuller (13:00)

Medical profession has this defined pretty darn well and a lot of things that they do. They have that who we need to be and the critical components of that pretty well defined. They have a Hippocratic oath. They go through a ton of training to understand the type and form of doctor they need to be and really get that down and the person that they want to be operating in that system.

skip forward to the checklist, the checklists are there for a medical for a doctor to go through and a process is like, so I don't make mistakes. So I can bring my best self every single time to the surgery that I have. And a lot of times I've seen some of those checklists, like my brother's doctor and, and he'll even make his own. And it's like, before I go into an appointment, I will X, Y, Z, right. I'll take a time, take a second to center myself. I will do

do the appropriate research on the client, on the patient that we have, and I will be able to head in. And then during it, they have additional checklists, right? So again, my thesis is that we're, and what the, is that we are skipping a lot of that stuff in sales that helps us define that who we want to be. Now, in terms of how we activate in that process and checklist, like very simple.

a process and checklist that can score a pipeline based on whether or not you have a sales rep has actually had a prep meeting with their manager and gone through coaching on a deal to bring their best self to that sales meeting that they have. That's massive help. If you can score a check, if you can score a pipeline based on whether a sales person has actually gone in

and reviewed, all of the core people in that deal has gone into their backgrounds and understands it, let's look at a certain stage of our pipeline understands how the, the vision, so understands the current state they're in, the vision state and the gaps. And you can then have that be a part of your process, but then also score your pipeline on.

right and understand based on the actions that the sales rep is taking to be the best person that they can be in this thing, it helps and it also helps the reps. Like so many times CRMs just give data, they're like, just go fill out these six fields that you need to learn and go ask these questions. But they do nothing to help coach or guide and actually help a rep be really good. And that's

what I believe a good checklist and a good process should do. Cause I mean, a pipeline is nothing but a lot of different sales processes, a lot of different checklists amalgamated into one view. And so what they did when they log in is, I'm just meeting them. Have we gone through, have we done our pre-call prep? we know, do we want to? Yeah, sure I can skip that, but I know if I skip that I'm going to be much less successful.

And I can actually measure that have here are some suggestions based on AI and what we've had on questions based on our framework that we have and who we choose to be as a sales team. So serving that up right there in the context of where they're doing their job is so helpful. Instead of forcing them to go to seven different things or go back to a learning management system or call a coach or it's just really helpful to have it in one spot.

KK Anderson (16:06)

Makes a lot of sense. we talked a lot about kind of checking the box. And so I'm going to ask this question just because I'm wondering if others are thinking it. So we have a box. Did you have a pre-meet with your manager? But don't we run the risk of just having more boxes to check?

Paul Fuller (16:22)

Yeah, and I think that's the critical nature of, starting with who moving to why and then moving to how, right? And so we do run that risk. If you, and membrane can be abused like any other system, right? You can give a rep for 400 things to do, and say, check all these boxes and make sure you do them and measure them.

That's just like any other system. where the difference becomes how do you define? And this is where I think a lot of sales leaders and teams skip is how do you define a process that actually brings in best practices and helps people? So if you, so for example, don't, don't give them a box to check and say, Hey, we defined, the org chart.

in the organization and we know who people are and that it's a great box. could literally give a checkbox. I've done that. Right. Instead in the process, give them a way to actually do it. Well, right. give them a way to understand the organization and how they're operating, visually and easily and in something that helps them do it.

We just did a big research study on the number of stakeholders in complex B2B sales and like the optimal number for deal success. And we found it hovers around four and a half, right? So between four and five stakeholders actually increase the deal success and above that decreases it. so if we're learning that and we're understanding that

KK Anderson (17:36)

Hmm, interesting.

Paul Fuller (17:40)

And we've decided as an organization that we want to, be the best sales team out there. And that's the who, and we're going to put the work in and be accountable to each other. Then a tool like that within to map those four to five makes is incredibly helpful. just right there. And then we can have great discussions and coaching discussions on, who those people are and how they operate and how they're going to help us work a deal.

we could say, Hey, are we talking with too many or too few? it's right there and we can see it and we can work it and it becomes a step, but it also becomes a critical part of it. It's a critical part of winning a deal, that, we know we needs focus. most people, like they'll set up a CRM with, know, here's your 17,000 fields that you need to fill out and do.

What we argue for is what are the core things that are going to truly drive both enablement for the sales team and excellence in results. And so take that time and really work on that. So I hope that answers your question, but that that's a philosophy thing that comes out of a lot of years of doing this. It's like, where is the impact and focus on that.

Mark Petruzzi (18:43)

Yeah, that is very easy to follow. So thank you, Paul. So teams don't need to be prompt engineers when it comes to generative AI. For example, at the same time, how do you enable and engage your team into what they can be doing, should be doing, how they should be leveraging the AI component of this?

So can you share two or three prompted actions or snippets that do the things that really matter, like reliably improve their execution, discovery follow ups, multi-threading asks, building up the sponsor relationship and going deeper and wider at the same time. And where do you surface them so that they're used often by the sales teams you work with as well?

Paul Fuller (19:29)

Awesome question. I have one very specific example that I love and this actually came, it's an innovation. It's actually going into our product pretty soon, but it's an innovation that the team made. And it's actually ties onto that stakeholder discussion that we just had. So let's say we, deal with a lot of complex sales, right? So B2B complex sales.

You have the four stakeholders, five stakeholders on a on a zoom meeting. And, one of the great innovations is that let's just say it allows us to be a more effective, salesperson, also ties into our processes. I now have the ability to, to follow up individually so much better. So I don't need to send that, I don't need to send that.

to every person, here's my notes. Here's the action items for all of us. I can take a fathom fathom integrates with membrane. I can take that and I can take a snippet and say, Hey, for each of these people, pull out their core questions, their core actions, and some key insights that we have for them. and help me craft an, an email directly for that.

Whereas that would have taken two, three hours, if you're really going to do a really well on a meeting follow-up, to do previously, you can now have that systematically built into a sales process. If you have a meeting with multiple stakeholders, four, five, six stakeholders, right? you now have this tool in here that AI and you can have a very specific, we do have what we call snippets in the system that

takes that and says, help me craft these very specific email. And then, then it becomes an editing and execution point because we know that as if we decide on the who that we are, we are going to choose to be accountable and choose to be servants. know that the best way to do that is individually one-on-one with a core team. Let's make sure that they're getting the attention that we've given. The barrier to that has always been, why I can't spend

three hours, four hours on a specific deal, especially for us, like it's if we're get a $3,000 MRR deal, right? that's great, but is that worth spending time, that level of time? And so there was always that trade off. You can start to remove those types of trade-offs systematically and it actually empower reps to be who you want them and who they want to be.

And that's the type I think is stuff is awesome. And we're also process like we're processing methodology based. So being able to query a thing like having, we don't, you don't need to be a, context engineer to, if you have developed your sales process, right. And we're, walking through that and we're capturing all the data in that sales process, the system itself.

engineers the context, right? Here's where we are in the process and here's maybe some of the differences that we can... And then you can start to query AI ⁓ directly and say, any recommendations based on our methodology, based on our process and based on what we've heard from them, that can help us be better and query that directly. Because you're right, one of the biggest challenges is that context engineering. And we kind of tend to throw...

KK Anderson (22:16)

Thank you.

Paul Fuller (22:25)

throw stuff at the wall in terms of that. we try to figure it out. if so, our, that's one of things I love about our system. If we've really defined who we want to be, the methodologies that we want to act, the process we can, then we can leverage that framework really well for AI to bring actual knowledge to us that we can translate to wisdom and how to act.

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In this replay of Mastering Sales with AI, AGS Co-Founder Mark Petruzzi is joined by KK Anderson and Scott Stollwerk, Chief Sales Officer at Pest Share, together with Gabriella Koenig of Collective[i], for a lively and practical discussion on how AI is reshaping the art of selling.

The conversation dives deep into what separates average sales teams from AI-empowered ones—and it’s not the tech itself. It’s the thinking. The panel explores how smarter questions, better hypotheses, and trust-driven selling can transform AI from a productivity tool into a true strategic partner.

They share real stories from the field: how AI predicted buyer shifts before humans saw them, how teams replaced pipeline calls with signal-driven insights, and how great sellers now act like the CEOs of their own territories—with AI as their superintelligence.

Whether you’re a CRO, RevOps leader, or AE curious about where to start, this session shows how to go beyond surface-level prompting and turn AI into an amplifier for strategy, trust, and results.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why AI transformation in sales is not about technology—it’s about better thinking and sharper questioning

• The “value hypothesis” framework for creating AI-assisted prep before every customer meeting

• How leading teams like Pest Share use AI to forecast, coach, and prioritize deals in real time

• What happens when sales leaders replace pipeline reviews with AI signal reviews

• How to coach teams to trust and collaborate with AI rather than resist it

• Why the best sellers now operate like CEOs of their own pipelines—and how AI makes that possible

Featured Speakers:

• Mark Petruzzi – CEO, Accelerant Growth Solutions (AGS)

• KK Anderson – Co-Founder, Accelerant Growth Solutions (AGS)

• Scott Stollwerk – Chief Sales Officer, Pest Share

• Gabriella Koenig – Moderator, Collective[i]

Key Topics:

• Prompting for insight vs. prompting for confirmation

• From search to strategy: moving beyond AI as a shortcut

• Trust, empathy, and human connection in the AI era

• Smarter forecasting and self-coaching with collective data

• Building AI-driven sales cultures that embrace change

#SellingTheCloud #GetAGS #ReimagineGrowth #AIforSales

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 our conversation with Neil Graham, Chief Revenue Officer at Disqo, we dive deeper into how modern CROs must rethink their org design, marketing execution, and AI integration strategies to stay competitive in 2025 and beyond. Neil shares why curiosity, humility, and bias for action are now non-negotiables; and how his team is operationalizing those values inside a flat, fast-moving GTM system.

From building AI-generated deal strategy sessions to deploying 24/7 agents on the website, Neil unpacks the real-world tools and team behaviors that are reshaping sales and marketing execution. This episode is packed with tactical insights for CROs leading through change.

What You’ll Learn

• Flatter Orgs, Bolder Execution: How Disqo’s three-layer model speeds up decisions and drives alignment across marketing, sales, and delivery.
• Non-Negotiables in Revenue Teams: Why curiosity, humility, and action orientation matter more than ever, and how to screen for them.
• AI as a Revenue Multiplier: How Disqo uses AI for outbound personalization, content creation, and automated deal intelligence.
• Coaching in the AI Era: How Neil’s RevOps team leads enablement through data-driven strategy docs and always-on insights.
• Creating New Roles for the AI Age: Why Disqo now has a dedicated AI strategy lead embedded in RevOps, and how other CROs can follow suit.

Key Topics

• Scaling outbound without bloating headcount
• Redefining RevOps to include data, process, enablement, and AI ownership
• Designing a leadership team that balances vision and execution
• The future of SDR and BDR roles in an AI-enabled GTM
• Using AI agents for 24/7 coverage and real-time buyer insights
• Building culture through feedback, modeling, and EQ-based hiring

Guest Spotlight: Neil Graham

Neil Graham is the Chief Revenue Officer at Disqo. A proven growth operator and revenue architect, Neil has helped scale iconic brands like Salesforce, Siebel, and Jive. At Disqo, he’s building a flat, AI-accelerated GTM machine that prizes speed, ownership, and alignment over legacy hierarchy.

Resources & Mentions

• Company: Disqo
• Frameworks: MedPick, DSF (Disqo Success Framework)
• Sales Tools: Gong, Clay, ChatGPT, AI agents
• Leadership Inspiration: Carl Schachter, Eli Cohen, John Barrows
• Book: Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

🎧 Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

KK Anderson (00:32)

to drill into this topic, topic three, talking a little bit more about the flat org and the expanding CRO role, we've had this conversation quite a bit on our podcast about how CROs are now...

taking responsibility of the marketing org, of the customer success org, of the sales org, of the entire go-to-market revenue system. And one of the things we see every day in our customer conversations is how disjointed marketing can be from sales disjointed product and from product management as well. And so

as marketing is kind of folded in under you and this kind of this new flatter org and you mentioned that the alignment that you're having with your SLT every week but tell me a little bit about how this is helping to kind of bridge that gap between marketing sales customer success like the whole go-to-market

Neil (01:24)

So I am a big fan of the CMO role in today's modern company and organization and, I know the SaaS and sort of technology world really well. So I'll speak from that perspective.

I can't really make a comment on other industries, but I am a big fan of, the CMO's role, and, sort of ownership of a modern AI driven marketing strategy. that said, we're trying to innovate quite a bit and do some really cool disruptive stuff and shift the focus of our marketing strategy here. And my CEO is a big vision behind that as well. And,

hoping that I'm actually a pretty good impact on that. and we've got some great leadership on our marketing team that's doing an awesome job thinking big and bold and in a differentiated way, but also really good at execution. And I think, this is a little bit of a side point, but I do believe in, making sure that on your management team, you've got a good, portfolio of leadership skills.

from vision to execution oriented people. So you can do both. And we've been really careful to kind of put together our leadership team on the marketing team and the sales team. I don't own the success side of the business here, as you mentioned. We've got a whole, Chief Customer Officer owns all of our post-sale delivery and customer success functions, implementation consultants, all that kind of stuff. But doing a great job there.

creating a leadership team that spans between visionary and execution oriented and has skills and that can kind of augment each other and kind of take both to market. That said, in marketing, I think what we've done a really good job at especially the last nine to 12 months, is shifting the focus to data-driven ROI creation activities and initiatives and making sure that everything that

everybody's focused on has proven results when it comes to lead creation and continued pipeline development of those leads into high converting opportunities. Right. And so we look at the data constantly in terms of how many leads, how many stage one pipeline deals were created, what conversion rates are going on and how much closed business happened from the marketing activities we're doing and dropping the stuff that doesn't have higher ROI.

And for us, some of the traditional things that most people in this industry think drive a ton of output are things that we've actually cut. And just from a perspective keeping our own sort of information and strategies a little bit behind the scenes, like I'll just leave it at that, but

in a pretty severe direction from less inbound and more outbound pipeline creation strategies with our marketing team and our marketing skill. that's been a lot more focused on demand gen, content, sales-facing, market-facing content, and overall product marketing.

And those are the skills that we've really built out on the team. because, you know, getting into like the final subject a little bit, but we can dive deeper into AI. But I mean, because of AI, it's like, it's allowed us to do this. there's mass personalization that we can do at scale, truly. And people have always said, you know, mass personalization at scale. like today with the tools that are available in the market for us to understand the ICP.

that we're focused on, our ideal customer profile and the key personas at those companies that have challenges that we solve for in a unique way. That data is all now massively in our CRM and with other tools, it makes it easy to augment a message to those people at those companies based on specifically what they care about and specifically what the business issues and challenges are at that company at scale.

so we can get out the best prospecting that the most senior BDR and or sales professional would do because they know this account and they know these people and they've worked with them the last 20 years, that's starting to happen at scale in an automated AI based way. So we can get a message out there to the market that's hyper contextualized for the person in the company that we're targeting.

And create awareness and pipeline that way. So mass personalization. The other thing we're doing in marketing, like creative content factories, like we're getting with AI, we're getting five, 10 times the output and a consistent brand voice.

through creative and through content creation than we did before. And it's all kind of wrapped around what I'd call before that curiosity culture, that experimentation culture, getting a lot of velocity there with, auto-generated hypotheses and variants and insights into how to create better content, have better creative, do better outbound at scale. And that's what the whole marketing team's focused on right now.

Mark Petruzzi (05:58)

Excellent. Neil, very cool.

Mark Petruzzi (06:02)

So Neil, what are the non-negotiables?

Neil J (06:05)

The non-negotiables. All right. Quick question back. Are you talking about what non-negotiables exist in terms of how I run my business, my team, the operation itself?

Mark Petruzzi (06:14)

Yeah, I mean, would say kind of yes, yes, yes, all three. Just what are the things you have to do for success in this business?

Neil J (06:17)

Okay,

KK Anderson (06:18)

as well.

Neil J (06:21)

Ah, that's a great question. I think they all, to me they all ladder back to, and maybe this is for other leaders too, they ladder back to the core values of the company that you're at. And hopefully as a business you've done a good job or as a business or a business leader flushing those core values out and making them applicable to the unique attributes of your culture and your company and the space you're in and all that kind of stuff. Because they shouldn't just be words that are up on a wall, right?

here we've got four core values at Disco. I'm not going to go into each one of them. They're actually on our website. They are up on a wall, but at other companies they've been slightly different. And I think about, I go back them quite a bit in the way that I lead, in way that I help my leaders lead the organization. If we keep kind of connecting things back to, as we talked about before, the DSF, the overall objectives of the company, for us it's our Disco success framework. Or if it's...

the core value of the employee experience and the culture itself, right? One of ours is together, win together as one team. Another is pursuing outsized impact. So delivering exceptional results, being relentlessly all in as a third. There's more, but I think those are really impactful for, especially for a customer facing organization that are driven by numbers and that have clear objectives in terms of what good performance is and what it isn't. Like having those three things be.

kind of non-negotiable to me and the rest of our core values non-negotiable and we try and bring things back to that quite a bit, right? We do a lot as a business to really rally around that. There's some other things too. I just think that, you know, I think about attributes in terms of how we deliver results every day and how we behave and operate. I've mentioned the word quite a bit already in this discussion, curiosity.

I want my team to be genuinely curious. I don't want people to like try to manufacture it. We're living in a world where AI is reshaping how we work. And when people lean into that and experiment and ask questions and figure things out, that's a real competitive advantage. And I think curiosity drives innovation and it's just non-negotiable for the skills of the people that are around my organization and how I lead.

A couple others that come to mind, one is humility. I think we all make mistakes, but what matters most is owning them. And I tell my team, over communicate, fall on the sword for your teammate or your customer, do it naturally. Again, needs to be natural. It needs to be part of their core instincts and their core kind of makeup. You can't force humility. It's too obvious. I think when leaders model this kind of...

behavior and they look for that in employees that they're bringing into the organization and they help reinforce it along the way. It really builds trust and unlocks a culture where people step up and support each other. And then I'd say the third kind of major attribute that is non-negotiable for people in and around the go-to-market operation that I want to be a part of is problem solving and sort of taking action. You can call it action orientation. You can say, you

problem solving kind of mindset, but people that don't wait for permission, they take charge. we're in a flat company as we've talked about where it's small, it's nimble. We can't wait. We got to go make things happen. We may fail, but that's okay. Use data, evaluate the scenario, make a decision to move forward and then don't just bring problems. You know, what frustrates me as a leader is when we get into a meeting or I have a one-on-one and it's like, you know, data dump of all the problems that are going on. Okay.

That's fair. There's always challenges, right? But what I try to coach and enable my leaders and the people that roll into my leaders are working with them and I am every day in terms of here's an issue I'm seeing that impacts our number one or number two priority. Here's the data that I'm looking at that calls this issue out. Do you agree with this data? Let's talk about this. Do we all agree it's an issue? Okay, cool. We agree it's an issue. Here's my idea is to solve for it. What else is there?

help me out team, help me out Neil, whatever it is, Versus just bringing problems, right? So I think that kind of shift in people's approach to the market and how we're gonna move forward and communicating internally and also with customers and prospects is like something that's just non-negotiable. It's like, you either have that skill, sure, we're always tweaking it and developing it, but you either have that kind of mindset in how you operate. And if you don't, not a problem solver, if you're not action oriented,

If you don't have humility, if you don't have a ton of curiosity, then we try and figure that out upfront and not bring those people in.

Mark Petruzzi (10:26)

Yeah, and those items are just far less coachable. So I totally get it and all great stuff.

Neil J (10:31)

That's a good one too.

Yeah, people talk about EQ quite a bit, right? To me, there's that emotional, I think the Q was quotient, but it was like emotional intelligence, right? And that kind of sums up a lot of this self-awareness and self-management and just having a focus on relationship management and taking action. So I think that's a, it's a buzz term, but you got to like know what you want out of EQ and make sure that you're seeking that out. When we interview, we...

Mark Petruzzi (10:40)

intelligence, yeah.

Neil J (10:57)

we ask scenario-based questions to flush this kind of stuff. Like, how would you act in this situation? And if you're not doing that, it's just so powerful. And so I think you gotta sit with your leadership team based on the role in the JD that you're looking to bring someone in on and make sure that you agree on the types of questions that you ask and where you like to see the conversations go to flush out those things like humility and curiosity and action orientation. Because the stories,

that people tell you will tell you if they are or not. And so I think that's a real way to be careful in terms of bringing people in that have the right skill set and the right approach to the culture and the DNA that you're looking at.

KK Anderson (11:36)

Let's dig into the AI conversation a little bit more. You've said that you've experimented with Gong, Clay, Chatubi-T, even building your own AI. Where are you seeing the most value?

Neil (11:47)

a lot of what you just said from a technology perspective. I think the disruption opportunities in marketing, I called some of them out already, like the, outbound personalization at scale, kind of creating these content factories. call them creative and content factories where you can.

KK Anderson (11:50)

Mm-hmm.

Neil (12:04)

really get higher output and get a consistent brand voice and create content and impactful creative at scale. I think there's a lot of automations just within marketing there and those disruptions, we have the always on personalization that we're, that we're able to have based on some of the tools that you mentioned and also through some of the tools that we're using on our website

with chat bot and through the tools that we're using with our outbound strategy. But think about the AI agents and go to our website and you can now interface through an agent and they handle the questions and the objections better than a human and they're always there. And so we've been able to use agent technology to actually create more leads into the organization than we had before covering it 24 by seven when before we were kind of

with higher propensity leads on our website, our chatbot interface would fall over to a human being. And we're able to cover that with an agent now. So we're able to kind of save a headcount or two just in one little process within business development. In sales, there's a lot of disruptions around mass prospecting, as I said.

We're doing deal intelligence and deal strategy sessions with those tools that you mentioned ⁓ to surface multiple data sets of information into one document.

and we're running deal strategy sessions for our top pipeline opportunities without the reps having to put anything together once a week. And we're typically getting through six or eight deals within about an hour and a half time. And the rep doesn't have to put anything into it. Like previously it would be, sales professional, let's do a deal strategy review with the team. Here's the PowerPoint template. You got to go fill all this stuff out. This data already exists.

in Salesforce and in Gong and all these places. Today, the AI can just pull it all together into one place and use something like a traditional framework like MedPick or value selling as a methodology or whatever you have, whatever your flavor is as the basis for that strategy doc.

let's say we use MedPic here. So walk me through this opportunity from a perspective of what's the pain points investigating the pain that the customer wants to try or the customer wants to solve for? what are the metrics that they have in terms of their business issues and challenges? And if they could solve for this pain, what's it going to drive their business? D, what's their decision criteria? Other D, what's their decision process?

So AI can take all that stuff in and around a framework like MedPic and surface it all into a document that we can all come onto a call together and go through really quickly. but the information's all there and nobody has to put all the information together like you used to have to do.

So things like that, deal intelligence, deal strategy sessions. If you think about customer success, QBR templates, customer success, health scoring, generation of QBR, support triage, support knowledge base, auto updates, all that can be kind of augmented and enhanced with the use of AI. So everything, marketing, sales, success, it's like we're seeing 510x improvements in efficiency through the use of AI, being able to kind of

bring the base level of information up into one place and allow us to be more strategic and talk about how do we win, not what's happening,

Mark Petruzzi (15:05)

that makes perfect sense, Neil. So you've questioned whether the whole concept of SDR, BDR functions will survive in this world here of AI. In general, how do you see AI reshaping early stage prospecting?

Neil (15:20)

I think like any technology change, there's going be massive job creation, not job loss. anything in history. whether it goes back to, the industrial revolution to the creation of the wheel like, we don't, it's hard to envision.

exactly what the jobs are going to be. But we all know that the information is there and it's up leveling the value that humans bring to the conversation. but we still need humans. we're gonna like the, roles of humans in the world of, which is

technology, solving problems for businesses, communicating that, executing on understanding their needs so we can solve those problems and show them how we're going to do it and then implementing it and being there to support it. Humans are going to have to be involved in all that stuff. What they bring to the table is just quickly being up leveled and the job creation is going to be massive around the future. I think in the short term,

There's efficiency gains. Like for example, we on our BDR team, because of some of the automation we put in place, we didn't have to fulfill on a head count that we had planned in this year. But that's just such a super in the moment tactical small point in time of what's going on. Ultimately, I think that, organizations are going to thrive with more and more job creation through the use of AI.

than job elimination, like any technology ever in the history of mankind.

KK Anderson (16:48)

It's almost as if we don't know even what those drops might be. it's moving so fast that there could be a whole new role in sales that we haven't even identified yet, or that hasn't even become mainstream yet. Right?

Neil (17:02)

Yeah. It's smart because people smarter than me. And what I mean, one job that we did just create in the last six months is like on my rev ops team, just this, like we've got a really talented person who's super curious, super innovative, very good at collaborating cross departmentally that rolls into my VP of rev ops and has been more on sort of the system side of our revenue operation.

Our rev ops team, like a lot, and maybe not everybody's as familiar with this, but our rev ops team is data and process and enablement, right? And so they're constantly looking at the data. They're, constantly using what we find in the data to drive new process. And as we roll out new process and tools and strategies, we have to enable everybody. So there's an enablement strategy and plan. There's resources in all those areas,

our team of...

people that are managing the tools, really talented individual there that we took and we promoted to be the head of our AI strategy from a tools and data model perspective. And I've practiced some other sales leaders that have this role on their team now. And that person has been in charge of understanding the potential use cases across. the entire go-to-market.

pipeline generation, to execution, to ongoing customer success and adoption and renewal. And they're identifying the use cases across these constituents and narrowing down the platforms of which we will use to enable those use cases. And some of those tools that you mentioned are going to be, or are already our major platform for AI enablement going forward. So we've taken like 30 different technology potential ideas that we're kind of bubbling up either in the form of

being used, being POCs, they're being evaluated across our go-to-market. And we've narrowed that down to about three platforms, maybe four. And we're excited about that because generally speaking, we can go tell our employees, go get creative with AI. You've got these platforms that will lead with AI in everything you do. Be creative, be curious, and lead with AI. And they're coming up with the use cases. We don't have to go solve for every use case. We just know that

We've picked platforms that holistically help us enable use cases around a really solid data model.

Mark Petruzzi (19:09)

So Neil, unfortunately we are coming to the end or towards the end of our time with you. Can we do a quick rapid fire and a few questions here to finish this up? All right. All what was the first product or service you ever sold?

Neil (19:19)

Sure.

man, you're catching me off guard. Product and service I ever sold. T-shirts. Junior high. Made a few thousand bucks and realized, wow, you I can be an entrepreneur and I can actually sell and win and pay for things. So at that time I bought my own motorcycle and then I ended up buying my own car, it was powerful.

Mark Petruzzi (19:28)

He searched

I love it.

KK Anderson (19:39)

awesome. Okay, favorite CRO or CEO that you like to follow?

Neil (19:43)

My favorite CRO is a gentleman that's not a CRO anymore, people aren't going to know him. Just a great coach and career mentor of mine, guy named Carl Schachter. Maybe they'll know him. Some people will know him. Carl, you know him.

Mark Petruzzi (19:54)

Yeah, I think more will know than you think.

Yeah, I know. Sure.

Neil (19:58)

In fact,

funny, because I met with a client yesterday, a gentleman in New York who worked with Carl at their previous endeavor where Carl was CRO. And he and I hit it off. And I'm like, yeah, we both commented on the fact that he's been a great and this gentleman was a engineering leader. But he's like, Carl taught me how to sell anyways. Great leader with us in the early days. was even he headed up some of the alliances teams at Oracle back in the

In the 90s, in the 2000s, I got to work under him at Salesforce as we scaled that company from 12 million in revenue to two and a half, three billion over about 10 years. This gentleman went and ran the Japan operation, went and ran part of Europe, but I got the fortunate experience to work for him and still call on him for coaching and assistance and all that kind of stuff.

Couple other people, really, and this goes back a little bit to the Salesforce ecosystem, but people that I'm big fans of, and I think some of the people here will know these people. Eli Cohen, who's the CEO of a company called Saleshood, an amazing leader, an amazing innovator. John Barrows, the CEO of company called JB Sales. I've used John and his methodology as almost like an extension of our selling team.

He has a methodology around just lightweight methodology on how to prospect really effectively for BDR organizations and how to go win for sales organizations. And it works. It's easy. It's logical. And the energy and the culture that he and his team bring to organizations when you partner with them are worth it. Outside of the methodology, it's just like an extension of your selling culture. And so really big fans of those people as CEOs of their companies.

small business.

Mark Petruzzi (21:33)

Yeah, you

you put out some great names there and I hope the audience does look and research some of them.

Neil (21:40)

no affiliation. Hopefully that helps. No,

KK Anderson (21:42)

Hahaha

Mark Petruzzi (21:43)

All right, well, Neil, thank you again. This has been fantastic. I guess real quick, where can people find you? What's the best way to connect if they'd like to?

Neil (21:52)

LinkedIn.

I'm a big fan of being super real on LinkedIn reach out to me on LinkedIn, tell me what you need, and I'll be direct with you and let you know if I can help.

Mark Petruzzi (22:01)

Excellent. Beautiful. Neil, thank you again and to our incredible audience. Thanks for joining. All the best.

Neil (22:07)

Awesome. Thank you.

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, we’re joined by Neil Graham, Chief Revenue Officer at Disqo and a seasoned revenue leader whose career spans Salesforce, Siebel, Jive, and Telem. Neil shares a ground-level view of what it takes to lead, scale, and modernize revenue organizations in an era where traditional sales playbooks are no longer enough.

From breaking out of funnel-stage rigidity to building flat organizations that prioritize curiosity, Neil walks through the changes CROs must embrace to stay ahead. He also shares how Disqo is rethinking GTM structure and leveraging AI to drive personalization, speed, and operational clarity; without drowning in tools.

What You’ll Learn

• Why the Playbook is Obsolete: What Neil really means when he says the old models no longer work, and what replaces them.
• Lightweight Rigor at Scale: How to build process and alignment without slowing teams down.
• From Bottoms-Up to Top-Down TAM: How Disqo blends relationship selling with TAM-led targeting for scale.
• Curiosity as Culture: Why curiosity is a non-negotiable leadership trait in flat, fast-moving GTM orgs.
• Leading Through Change: How to coach teams to self-govern, move fast, and stay mission-aligned in a no-layer org model.

Key Topics

• Building sales organizations without bureaucracy or bloat
• Aligning marketing, sales, and success teams around business outcomes
• Using AI to power real-time customer insight and hyper-relevant outbound
• Flattening GTM structures for speed, ownership, and clarity
• Creating cultures where experimentation and impact are rewarded

Guest Spotlight: Neil Graham

Neil Graham is the Chief Revenue Officer at Disqo and a proven sales leader with decades of experience scaling GTM organizations from Series A to post-IPO. Known for his ability to bring structure without red tape, Neil has helped some of the most recognized B2B SaaS names balance scale with agility in high-growth phases.

Resources & Mentions

• Company: Disqo
• Framework: DSF (Disqo Success Framework)
• Sales Tools: Gong, Clay, ChatGPT
• Books & Influence: MedPick methodology, Salesforce early days, AI-led sales enablement

🎧 Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Mark Petruzzi (00:33)

Welcome to today's episode of Selling the Cloud Podcast. We're excited today to welcome Neil Graham, Chief Revenue Officer of Disco. Neil is a proven revenue leader who has helped scale organizations at Salesforce, Siebel, Jive, Telem, and now Disco, the best name of them all. At Disco, Neil leads a go-to-market organization of about 45 inside a nearly 300-person company.

KK Anderson (00:33)

Thank you.

Mark Petruzzi (01:00)

His career spans taking companies public, guiding series A to series F growth, and balancing early stage venture backed and private equity operating models. Today, Neil will share what it looks like to lead and scale revenue organizations when the old playbook is obsolete, which pretty much is all the time nowadays. Covering agility,

operational discipline, and why CROs must embrace a new approach to building revenue in 25 and beyond. Here are the four themes we'll explore. First, when the old playbook is obsolete. So when these old legacy models no longer fit, no longer work, how do leaders adapt? Scaling from 10 to 100 million, that sweet spot, especially in the SaaS and ISV world.

And then, the concept of lightweight operational rigor, like how to combine a sleeves rolled up selling model with really good process and tools, but not too many process and tools slow How flat orgs need to be structured and how they work and how that really puts more pressure and responsibility on the CRO.

and also sprinkling AI into the go-to-market mix. How Neil is experimenting with AI to augment productivity and rethink traditional roles. Neil, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome to Selling the Cloud.

Neil (02:26)

Thank you, Mark. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

Mark Petruzzi (02:30)

Happy to have you here. All right, topic one, when the old playbook is obsolete. So, Neil, I've heard you say, don't even know what the playbook is right now. It's all getting disrupted. Tell us a little bit about what you meant by that.

Neil (02:43)

thanks for the introduction. That was great. look, privileged to be at a lot of great companies through the years and hopefully caught on to a little infrastructure and kind of prioritization through the years in terms of how I approach things. we're in a really unique age today.

the traditional playbooks from the last, I'd say 20, 25 years in a way, are going out the window in a way they're still there. And I think if you think about what's happening with AI and with how that impacts operational structures, go to market strategies, people and process skills.

And overall playbooks, it's like you really have to kind of reconsider the way you're operating at every step of the way yet continue to operate and make sure that you put one foot in front of the other and execute. And so what does that look like? we've spent a lot of time. I think about the back in the days at Oracle in the early days and then at Salesforce, where we really scaled some organizations from small to large.

the playbooks that we created around, marketing and sales and customer success became kind of a standard. And it's like, if you think about the processes from lead development, MQLs to SQLs to, early stage pipeline and the sales process from stage one to being selected at stage four or five and getting into a negotiation, the process of value selling along the way where you identify.

the customer's business issues and challenges, you map your solution to that. You think about trying to position how you're unique against the competition or the status quo and quantify that, that value and articulate that really well to the client. A lot of that was put on our people and we would train and enable around these processes and these plays, try to roll out frameworks like, every part of the sales process, dissecting it.

providing people visibility and information into what it takes to be successful, whether it comes to discovery, whether it comes to running a great demo, whether it comes to positioning the differentiated value prop, whether it comes to building the business case of the impact that you're going to make at the organization in terms of driving business outputs, whether it comes to scoping and professionally delivering a plan to make the customer successful, whether it comes to the negotiation, the objection handling, the competitive intel.

All that stuff's still there. And our customer facing people and processes need to execute flawlessly on that. At the end of the day, it's just that the information is so readily available and we'll talk more about it later with AI have to do everything that I just said, but it's so flat in terms of being able to access that information, position that information on the fly.

and make it part of your cadence that some of the traditional models of the playbooks and the enablement plans and the objection handling frameworks and all that kind of stuff literally go out the window and they become kind of almost in the moment. So I don't like at the end of the day, I think the old playbook being obsolete, I don't know. I think from my point of view, customer value still wins,

the modern model starts with the customer's business case, knowing their business issues and challenges, understanding the pressures and constraints they have, and your people being able to flush that out and have that information at their fingertips when they come into a conversation. Then being able to articulate how the solution that they bring to market is differentiated and tie that differentiation to the measurable outcomes.

It's just doing it in a more productive and higher impact and flatter and faster way. But every interaction that you have should clarify, how you come back to the business issue and challenge the customer has. So I think second, the AI tech that's out there puts these answers within reach and, we're able to have this information quicker and faster than ever before. And then I think third, just creating a culture and sort of a overall.

go-to-market system that is rooted in curiosity. So your people and your processes continue to evolve quicker and faster than the competition is really important for every company.

KK Anderson (06:30)

I echo everything you said, Neil. this morning, as a matter of fact, I pulled out my phone and I wrote it in my notes thought exactly what you just said. The activities, what's changed now is that the activities aren't the work. Going into CRM and working in CRM, that is what's obsolete. Right? You can't do the same things every day and expect to have a differentiated

customer focused, customer obsessed approach, right? it's all about leveraging all of this super intelligence, leveraging AI, what's at our fingertips to do the hard. And so sales, in my view, is going back to what it was originally, the beginning of the sales profession, right? Where it was all about solving problems asking great questions and getting to know people and relationships.

And then we had all of these years of playbooks here's what you do, here's what you say, here's how you handle this objection, here's how you position this, here's how you differentiate this. And it's almost now, like the second something gets turned into a PDF, it's no longer relevant, right? And so it is interesting. All of this is allowing sellers to do the hard things, which is if you go a day or a week,

God forbid, and you don't feel that anxiety of what am I gonna say on this call or how am I gonna approach that person, then you're not doing the hard things. Ticking off tasks is old school. That's the old playbook, right? Anyhow, so as you think about this kind of seismic shift that's happening, what are the principles that are guiding you as you lead today? If you're going back to basics,

back to you were just talking about, like what are those principles? Like how do you lead through this kind of a change?

Neil (08:04)

Yeah, look, first of all, think, it goes a little bit to the second kind of area of discussion. It's sort of how do you create this lightweight operational rigor, especially as you scale companies I've kind of been at a few companies now that are series A, series B. there's a disruptive technology that's solving for a problem uniquely in the market. Doing it, it's a better mouse trap

than what was there before. And because of this unique model, the unique data set, the cloud, whatever it is, it's able to solve the problem in a more effective, more efficient, more holistic, better quality way. The company I'm at right now is disrupting the marketing media effectiveness measurement market, the old stodgy providers that are out there that weren't as innovative and disruptive.

We're disrupting that. I'm entering into a company, I've been here about a year and a half, where had, a better mousetrap than the competition, that a company could build on their own. Companies want a partner, they don't want to kind of be in the core competency of doing what we do. so we've been taking share from the competition.

in the early days as we built the product five, six years ago and started to take it to market, we hired some good people from the competitors and knew the space and they brought their book of business and their relationships and it was a lot of hard work. Don't get me wrong, but at the end of the day, we were able to take share where we had relationships and where we had knowledge and sort of the bottoms up, right? And now we're moving more towards what I'd say is understanding the total addressable market.

aligning our skills and our people and our organization around that, picking our bets on where is the biggest total addressable market, what can we take on right now as we scale and grow and we get past 50 and 100 and 150 million, aligning our skills and resources, training and enabling, getting the right people, hiring the right people, all that kind of stuff to go take the market more from the top down. Having that bottoms up, but also that top down where...

We know this is the right place for us to aim the arrow and shoot. And we're going to put a lot of emphasis behind where we shoot and make it really impactful, improve our win rates, execute more flawlessly from marketing to sales to success and do a great job serving that market. So as we look at doing that and things are at the same time getting disrupted by AI, I've kind of run this play before where you're taking a company from 10, 20, 30 million to hundreds.

and have the playbook and kind of like know the motion, right? You build in some process, you bring in world-class tools, you align your people and your skills to the market opportunity, you help limit the distractions on stuff that's not within that market opportunity that's the biggest bang for the buck. However, you still have to be nimble, you still have to kind of pay attention and pivot at the same time.

And so there's a lot of art and science to rolling out lightweight process and tools and enablement and skills, yet at the same time, not over engineering it so we can go execute and we don't get in our own way and we don't have a lot of bureaucracy and there's not a lot of layers. And I think we've done that really nicely here. It's like I kind of came into an organization where we had a marketing team and there was a bunch of different pockets of

weird reporting structure. And we quickly fixed that where it's me to my heads of marketing versus like in demand gen versus product marketing versus PR and comm and then they have teams, right? And then on the sales side, we did the same thing. We kind of had a one size fit all motion for the salespeople and they were kind of going after the market based on what they all knew. We layered in where do we need to be and what skills

and tools do we need to have in order to go attack that market? Let's bifurcate the sales team because we saw two plays going on in the market. And we did that. We aligned the right people with the right opportunity. We hired the right people coming in to grow into these two opportunities. And we've rolled out playbooks and processes and competitive packages and, objection handling frameworks and all that kind of stuff for all the people that are in these two swim lanes in terms of how we go to market. What's been really cool in the last

12 months is we've embraced AI to just do all that bigger, better and bolder. Right. And so, answering your question, I think first, leaders need to get out there and be in the market, especially at this size of a company. can't, more so than ever. It's, like, you have to be in the field. You have to be with your customers. You have to be with your teams. If you're not spending 50, 60, 70, 80 % of your time.

even as the CRO is the operational leader, executive part of the executive committee, all that kind of stuff. If you're not out there in front of the market, then something's wrong, right? So that's number one. Number two, just building this culture of genuine curiosity, I think is critical. You have to hire then promote and exit people based on curiosity or a lack thereof.

And that's in everything you do. It's if people aren't asking questions, if they're not genuinely curious in front of the customer, in front of their own internal teams, if they're not innovating and trying new things, and if they're continuing to be focused on delivering the results, right? Like we have OKRs here. We call it DSF, the Disco Success Framework. My marketing team knows exactly what's expected out of them when it comes to the specific

overarching business goals, the key metrics to achieve those goals on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis, and the initiatives that they have to go solve, to go generate those key metrics that they continue to evolve around. We're kind of continuing to tweak our initiatives every month, every quarter, to make sure that we're hitting the actual metrics in alignment with our objectives. And if you don't have people not only being curious and being innovative, but also keeping their eye on

Hey, is this an alignment with the objective and the key result that I'm trying to drive? And if it's not, what the hell am I doing? Let me stop doing that, right? And allowing people to be informed around that, have the information be very clear so they can almost self-govern because as you create a flat organization, there's a lot of greatness with that, but there's a lot of challenges that come with that as well. And you have to allow people the power to kind of understand, does this map back to the key objective and...

desired outcome that I'm working on. if it doesn't call an audible, let's get the hell out of here and let's stop doing this. Right.

Mark Petruzzi (14:07)

Well, Neil, you have me thinking and wishing this was an investor presentation rather than a podcast. And what I mean by that is we, get to a fair amount of opportunities to hear CROs like yourself when they're looking for funding and, get to get excited about that or not excited about that. And you actually made me put together a thought that has happened in the back of my mind many times, but

not as clear as today. And that is when we're doing this podcast and a CRO or a CMO gets on and, or a CEO gets on, they start talking about their approach. And I start to just think exactly that of, this should be an investor presentation because I, want a piece. So that's very impressive. As you know, I hear these things and we have podcasts every week as well. So I love the way you, positioned all that and you went,

radiant to this direction, but I'd like to have you tap a little bit and go a little deeper.

Neil (15:03)

it kind of

a little bit of the, how do you build in this operational rigor, but also like, how do you do it in a flat world? So, I mean, feel free to drill in there because it was kind of two of those.

Mark Petruzzi (15:14)

Yeah, now

that's great. And I also like, you described how these some CROs are clinging to these old cadences and funnel metrics and SDR handoffs and the whole process of lead generation. What do you feel are broken about these models and a little bit on how do you fix them?

Neil (15:31)

I don't know if it's broken. I mean, look, don't get me wrong. we still have operational metrics that we look to kind of the leading indicators on a weekly and bi weekly and monthly and quarterly cadence. And still one of the objectives is an objective around, MQL and lead creation, right, that my marketing team owns and

SQL and down funnel lead, qualification that the BDR team owns and SAO generation, which is our stage one opportunity that the BDRs and the AEs and the CS team own in terms of creating net new pipeline. And we have a certain amount of pipeline that we got to create every week, every month, every quarter. And, we're trying to be in front of it with key initiatives that we're rolling out to improve our outbound motion.

And we're looking at Salesforce dashboards and summarizing all this stuff up.

just take the sales team, for example. We've got about 20 sellers and I've got three SVPs. And so our sellers are director and VP level, our SVPs are managerial level and they report to me. And so we flattened it those three layers. In marketing, it's three layers across the whole organization.

on our success and delivery teams and our product teams and our engineering teams, we've gotten it down to three layers. I think that's really helped us as a business. Our CEO drove that and...

made it a mandate and not everybody kind of understood the why. And we did a lot on our all hands calls and our internal communications to help people understand the why behind all this. And over a period of about a month, month and a half, we got the company that flat. And the goal was to get faster information flow and get quicker, better decisions and have more experimentation and fail faster and succeed faster, right? And just have.

higher organizational ownership and impact, have impact be visible, versus lost in silos. And if you can really then build your, internal compensation and promotion and recognition system, which we do a lot there, we do stuff on a quarterly, biannual and annual basis around those subjects. If you can build it around impact.

And make it impact based in alignment with your goals and objectives back to your OKRs and promote the people that are having high impact. Those are going to be the people that are the most curious. Those are going to be the people that are experimenting the most. And, if you do this the right way, you'll start to set those examples. And pretty quickly within about a year and year and a half, we've weeded out a lot of people that aren't curious. we've kind of weeded out people that aren't trying to make an impact.

Now the challenges with that is when you have that flat of an organization, it can really blur decision kind of ownership and there can be competing initiatives and there can be some accountability gaps and it can overload some of your managers and your leaders. I'll give you an example. It's like my CEO and I are very tight at the hip on working with the marketing team and

There can be times where my CEO will grab people that roll into me and send them in a particular direction. And it's like, he and I have to be really well aligned on what are we trying to accomplish here? What are the goals and objectives of the company? And let's make sure that we're pushing people towards the same outcome, because if there's any competing interests, it can get confusing for our employees.

And so just the communication and the collaboration and the work that we do, have at this company, we've got about two hours set aside every week for SLT alignment. that for the executive team to meet, to go through all the key initiatives and strategies, everything from people to process, to tools that we're using, to the outcomes and the initiatives that we have, and making sure that we're all in alignment.

in this flat culture, we get everybody kind of pointed in the right direction. So hopefully that helped a little bit, it can create an opportunity, but there also can be a lot of challenges with it as well.

KK Anderson (18:57)

You know.

Really, really insightful, Neil. Thank you for that.

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