In this episode of Selling the Cloud, we sit down with Josh Hoffman, a seasoned go-to-market leader who has guided sales transformations at Dell, Avaya, Poly, Datto, and now ControlCase. Known for his “sell-with” philosophy, Josh shares what it really means to drive symbiotic outcomes, where sellers, partners, and customers win together.

He unpacks lessons from decades of leading in high-stakes environments, including mergers, market pivots, and rapid scale, and makes the case for consistency, humility, and emotional intelligence in modern sales leadership. From shifting away from zero-sum thinking to building customer-aligned mutual action plans, this episode is a masterclass in outcome-based selling and team-driven success.

What You’ll Learn

• Sell-With vs. Sell-To: Why Josh believes the most successful sellers don’t “close deals”, they solve problems alongside the customer.
• How to Build Mutual Action Plans: Practical ways to bring partners and clients to the same side of the table from day one.
• The Role of AI in Sales Coaching: How Josh’s teams are using AI for prompt writing, context synthesis, and deal prep, without losing the human element.
• Coaching Through Change: Why consistency, not charisma, helps teams thrive through high-pressure acquisitions and pivots.
• From Manufacturing to CRO: Josh’s story of going from putting screws in motherboards at Dell to building global GTM teams, and what shaped him along the way.

Key Topics

• Transforming sales cultures from transactional to consultative
• Teaching sellers to ask better questions, and when to talk less
• Why top sales leaders reduce the distance between themselves and the AE
• Coaching through ambiguity and building career-defining moments
• Why consistent behavior builds trust in times of change
• Using AI to augment, not replace, frontline coaching and prep

Guest Spotlight: Josh Hoffman

Josh Hoffman is the Chief Revenue Officer at ControlCase and a proven sales leader with over two decades of experience building high-performance teams. With a track record of leading in moments of transformation, Josh is passionate about coaching sellers to exceed what they thought was possible, through shared success, customer obsession, and scalable systems of growth.

Resources & Mentions

• Book: The Qualified Sales Leader by John McMahon
• Book: FYI: For Your Improvement by Korn Ferry
• Company: ControlCase (compliance & audit automation)
• AI Tool Mention: Grammarly, prompt engineering
• Leadership Inspiration: Todd Abbott, Mike Jenner, Mark Anderson

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

Mark Petruzzi (00:34)

Welcome to today's episode of Selling the Cloud podcast. We're excited to welcome Josh Hoffman. Josh has built his career leading sales and go-to-market strategies at some of the most iconic companies in tech. He started in Dell's early inside sales organization and went on to senior leadership roles at Avaya, Poly and Datto, often stepping in during times of transformation.

Along the way, Josh has become known for his self philosophy and his passion for helping people build careers and outcomes they once thought were completely out of reach. At the heart of that philosophy is symbiotic growth. The idea that sellers and customers succeed together. Instead of pushing a deal across the line, Josh frames selling as sitting on the same side of the table with a customer.

tackling the problem on the other side and building shared wins that last. We'll cover four themes today. The sell with era that we feel like we're in today, lessons from a career across Dell, Avaya, Poly and Dotto, leading times in a time of change. We certainly have that world amongst us today. And the future of go-to-market in the age of AI and ecosystems.

John, us again, welcome to Selling the Cloud.

Joshua Hoffman (01:47)

Thank you so much for having me here today, Mark. I'm so appreciative of you and the team and all that you've done to help us all grow. And so it's a pleasure to be here.

Mark Petruzzi (01:56)

Excellent, thanks again. All right, Josh, so you often talk about creating symbiosis in selling. What does a sell with model look like in practice?

Joshua Hoffman (02:05)

That's a great question. For me, it's about helping people understand that we're not here to pick up a PO. We're not here to get a credit card number. We're here to solve something together. We're here to deliver something that's gonna help all of the organizations be better off. And in a lot of those environments, I've worked in direct sales, I've worked in partner sales, and I've worked in hybrid sales. They all have a slightly different meaning.

But when I think about it the most, you described it at the beginning. It's about making sure that all of us that are solving the problem together, we're all on one side of the table. Sales is not combat. Giving somebody a product or a service that they need is helping them be successful. And if we all focus on what that means, if we're all laser focused on the outcome that we're trying to deliver, then we're all in it together. We're all with each other in that.

KK Anderson (02:56)

could not agree with you more, Josh. And my question is, so how do you help your sellers make that shift from quota-driven, transactional, I need to educate, I want to talk about my product mindset to one where they are the problem solver sitting on the same side of the table. How do you do that?

Joshua Hoffman (03:16)

Yeah, Kristen, thanks for the question. I appreciate it. There's a couple of things. First of all, I do want sellers to be quota driven. I do want them to be successful. They have goals to meet also. And part of leading a team is making sure that everybody succeeds company, people, internal, external companies that you're working with. And so there is definitely a part of me as a leader of revenue that says that we need to make sure that they are quota driven.

But the shift comes when you help people understand that the more that they listen and the more that they ask questions, the better they're going to understand why are they in the room today? ⁓ Why are they a part of this conversation? And if you can get them into that mode where they care in a way that allows them to open themselves up to different possibilities. And I know that's a very EQ set of statements.

but you want them to be sitting there thinking that I'm here to help somebody else succeed today. And the way that I phrase it, for example, with partners is if I focus 100 % on your growth, then it's going to work out. If you grow, we grow. If you succeed, we succeed. And getting that mindset to take place.

It's a big shift for people, especially people that have come out of a transactional sales environment or have come out of something that's maybe a little bit more cutthroat. I live and breathe this idea that consultative sell with strategies make a difference. they not only build a better business for the client, for us, for the partner, it does help us build a better world. And that might sound a little bit kind of hippie-ish.

But the reality is that I do want the world to be better. And if we all work together, it's going to be.

KK Anderson (04:56)

It reminds me of, you said hippie-ish, I love that, my Austin, keep Austin weird roots, but one of the things, one of the tactics that I've used in my 20 years of sales training has been, as soon as you feel the compulsion to start talking about your product, ask another question.

Joshua Hoffman (05:11)

That's a really interesting way of phrasing it. know, Kristin, I've had the benefit of seeing the outcome of the good work that you provide and how you help enable other people to get better and grow. And that goes a long way. It's really well put.

Mark Petruzzi (05:25)

And with both of those examples, we're hitting on things that I hold near and dear to my heart. And we're living in a world that's not really built that way anymore. Everybody kind of looks at things. We look at it in politics, for one, that you have to win. And then you really have to make somebody else lose, too. And that's not the way I look at it.

I've always been someone who's used the term win-win and that's something I always want to do. And then it's nothing in what I do, at least in sales. Maybe there are parts of sales that is closer to a zero-sum game. But when you're looking at the value you can bring for clients and the return on investments and the business cases you can build for your clients, that's not zero-sum. You really can look at it from a solution standpoint.

and allow that to really hit home and work to your advantage, not against you. So we love stories here at Selling the Cloud. So can you give us an example, a story, where this approach has created an outcome that wouldn't have been possible in a traditional sell-to model or just a mindset of win-lose?

Joshua Hoffman (06:36)

I have a lot of stories and so I'm going to generalize just a little bit so I don't name names, but I'm going to use an example where there was a partner engaged as well, where we were the provider of the product or service, but there was a partner that had a client that was involved. And the way that things had traditionally operated at this organization is that the sellers were consistently focused on selling to the partners.

You've got to buy this. You've got to buy this. And then you got to go sell it. You've got to go figure it out. You need to internalize and ingest all this information and data. And you got to figure out how to go make it happen. And we changed our approach dramatically. One of the first things we did is we actually brought partner salespeople and SEs into our new hire training. And we said, you're part of the team. we're not trying to sell to you.

And sure, you might actually be the ones writing the PO for it, but we're in this together. And so we're going to enable you the same way that we enable our people. We're going to speak the same language. We're going to talk about the same benefits. We're going to learn together. We're going to grow together. And as that shift took place and people started to see ⁓ their cohorts that were on the other side of the table before, I'm trying to get a PO from you.

Now they're saying, OK, we're on the same side of the table right now. We're in this together. And once we had crossed that chasm, we now had the opportunity to say, you know what? There's another chasm to go across. Now let's get the customer to be a part of this. Let's get the client to be a part of this. Let's put them on the same side of the table with us. And let's take the approach that we're here to deliver an outcome. And we're going to co-strategize. I'm going to use the word co- bunch right now.

We're going to co-strategize, we're going to co-create, we're going to co-decide what the solution is. And when we get to the end of the line, we're actually sitting in that mode of getting a PO, getting a check, getting a credit card, whatever it might be, given the different organization. We're not closing a sale. We're solving a problem. And that became a constant driving force.

in the approaches that, that candidly I was able to take, but really organizationally that we were able to take, because we're a team. It's not just me. ⁓ Whether it was at Palo Alto networks, whether it was at Avaya, whether it was at Datto, Poly, whether it's here at Control Case, where we view things the same way. We're here to solve a problem. We're here to create an opportunity. We're here to create an outcome together.

and having a collaborative environment makes all the difference in the world.

KK Anderson (09:08)

win together, right? And I know exactly who you were talking about, Josh. And you're right, you get to a point where all of a sudden your customer is calling you and saying, hey, I've got this client call. Can you help me prepare for it? And then you're building pipelines.

Joshua Hoffman (09:10)

Yeah.

That's right.

multiple organizations. I've had the chance tell our team, look, go put on their shirt for the day. You don't have to wear a Control K shirt. You don't have to wear a Datto shirt or a Palo Alto Network shirt. Go put on their shirt for the day. You guys are part of a team. And that team mindset, it solves problems so much faster. And that's what we're really here to do. As long as you're working for a company where you believe in the product or the service that you're selling,

KK Anderson (09:34)

Put on their shirt. I love it.

Joshua Hoffman (09:47)

and you're not working for something that's trying to gouge people or trying to do something nefarious. I happen to have been fortunate, the companies that I've worked for for my entire career, maybe minus one or two at the early part of my career, we were really trying to solve something important. And it was something that I believed in. That's an important part of that as well. You've got to and I tell this to people all the time, you got to be happy. Part of being happy is making sure that when you go to work every day, it doesn't always feel like work because you believe in what you're doing.

KK Anderson (10:14)

Yeah, 100%. And it absolutely applies in the COCEL environment, but even in direct B2B, you at Control Case, are you more direct B2B, or are you more channel partner?

Joshua Hoffman (10:26)

we do business in 73 countries right now. Not every country has the same kind of partner model. so depending on where we are in the world, it could be direct sales. It could be consultancy partners. It could be referral partners. It could be technology partners. And in the case of one of the missions that we have, it's using MSPs and ITSPs. So I have a vision that

MSBs and ITSBs should be a bigger part of the compliance journey. It's using partners that are actually part of the technical journey that the client's about to go on. so depending on where we are in the world, it could be any one of those things.

KK Anderson (11:00)

But you know it's one of the ways that we met previously Josh I've got a lot of experience in assessing sales organizations and going through this whole you know sales effectiveness and improvement process and almost always out of hundreds of organizations almost always the sellers come back as they're good at hunting getting the meeting and then

the next best skill that they have is presentation approach or going into like sell value. And I think they get so comfortable in learning the value proposition, learning the talk track, learning about the features, advantages and benefits of the product that they're trying to sell. And they get that word sell so stuck in their mind that I'm a salesperson, just Mark, we were earlier talking about that very thing.

There are so many people that don't even like the word sales. And so it's almost transitioning their mindset from I'm a salesperson to I'm a problem solver. So my question for you, Josh, would be like for the CROs that are listening, and that's probably most of our audience, what's one thing they can do now to help start to drive that culture of ask more questions, solve more problems?

Joshua Hoffman (12:05)

Well, part of coaching is spending time with people. And in any sales leadership role, you see people get their time pulled in multiple directions. Should I be working on this Excel spreadsheet? Should I be working on this report? Am I spending time in an operational meeting? Am I spending time doing X, Y, or Z? When one of the biggest opportunities that people have is to spend time with people in the environment where they're talking to customers or partners.

and having the chance to talk about it afterwards, to talk about what went well, what didn't go well, what would you keep, what did you change, what did you learn? There's all kinds of cliche phrases around that. But that kind of coaching environment is what helps people get better. Now, of course, you have to be a sales leader that believes in this model, and not every sales leader does. And so you have to be a little careful about that. But assuming that you do, that time that you spend with people is one of the most valuable things you can do.

The other thing that you can do is model behavior. And I'm the first one to say, look, I screw things up all the time. I'm not perfect. I don't always get it right. But what I do try and do is when I'm sitting inside of that environment, when I'm with the client, the partner, the salesperson, the account manager who's leading that account, is I do try and model that behavior and make sure that they're seeing what, at least what I hope good looks like.

Again, said with a little bit of humility, it's not always great, but I try and be very consistent in my approach and it served me well. That's the advice that I give, spend time with your people. there's nothing more valuable than that. That's how you help people get better. And one of the ways that I've branded myself throughout my career is that helping people find a career they only thought aspirational.

is a motivator for me, helping people learn and grow and develop into something that they never expected. And you can't do that if you don't get to know your people, if you don't get to spend time with them, if you don't get to coach them along the way.

Mark Petruzzi (13:56)

Very, impactful. Everything that you just said there. All right, let's switch over to the second topic. know, and this is a perfect build on where we've started, like lessons from a career in tech. So you have been through multiple transformations in your career and transformations within the companies that you've worked within. From being within Dell's Inside Sales team,

to intern CRO at Poly, Dorn, what turned out to be a very turbulent year. What experiences has shaped your leadership style the most?

Joshua Hoffman (14:29)

good gosh. Let me start with, I feel so blessed because I have been shaped more times than I can count. I've been shaped by great leaders. I've been shaped by great situations of growth. I've been shaped by times of, as you said, turbulence where things are not always going well. And I've done my best to learn from each one of those situations.

Picking one out of the group is a little bit challenging to consider, but I look back on my early career at Dell. My first job at Dell was putting screws in motherboards. Candidly, I had tried sales, I failed. It wasn't going well for me, and I said, I'm gonna go do something different. And getting the opportunity to walk into an environment at Dell is probably 1992. They said, the phone's ringing off the hook.

We need more people in sales. came onto the manufacturing floor. Who wants to come to sales? me, so they chose about 25 of us raised our hands and me and Rick. So Rick knows who I'm talking about. We were the two that were selected and we end up, sitting on the phones for four hours a day and going back to our manufacturing job or vice versa, depending on what day it was. And I got to be part of an environment that was

growing like a rocket ship that was also going through challenging times. This was the time of the exploding laptops. And so not exactly one of the best moments in that company's history. And I got to learn from some amazing leaders. Now that carried on. I had leaders at Dell consistently, actually throughout my career, I could probably call out 10 leaders easily that have made a difference in helping to shape who I am.

Almost all of it leads back to a common theme, which is being given the opportunity to step into a situation and learn on the fly. I wasn't always put into places where I knew what to do. I wasn't put into places because I had the experience. I was put into situations where I had the opportunity to learn, to grow, to be creative, and to help come up with what are we going to do to solve this.

And I give a lot of thanks to people that were willing to put trust into me at various points in my career. And that's what's shaped me the most. That's the consistent theme throughout all of those organizations is let's let Josh do it, which by the way, wasn't always perfect. It didn't always succeed, but I've been fortunate more times than not. It's been a successful.

KK Anderson (16:53)

You need to screw the tight, the screw is a little tighter on those laptops so they don't explode.

Joshua Hoffman (16:57)

Yeah, well, okay. It's a funny story when you look back on it now. It was unbelievably stressful at the time. Dell grew so much over so many years. when I started, it was a thousand people. When I left, I think it was 70,000. And, but they gave me opportunities to go learn on getting to move to China, getting to move to India, getting to lead the first services organization, doing things that

KK Anderson (17:05)

totally agree.

Joshua Hoffman (17:21)

that I hadn't done before, but also that the company hadn't done before. And so we got a chance to make things happen along the way. It was pretty spectacular.

KK Anderson (17:29)

Really cool, and I like what you were saying about trust. That's so important. So you worked under our mutual friend, Todd Abbott, and he's such a strong, awesome leader. I know that he had a strong style and impact on you. What would you take from that relationship specifically, just out of curiosity, that influences you today?

Joshua Hoffman (17:37)

did.

⁓ look, I love Todd. I had this amazing experience with him. I think it was three years or so that I had the opportunity to work for him. And ⁓ during that time, I got to experience a different type of rigidity and approach that I had experienced other times in my careers, but never with the clarity that Todd uses to set expectations.

to create an environment for people to succeed, to approach things both analytically and with creativity at the same time. He was a champion of the people on his team and you always knew that Todd had your back. And by the way, I have actually been very focused in my career of finding people to go work with and for that are like that.

that provide that kind of environment. It's not always easy, by the way. My CEO today, Mike Jenner, has many of those same qualities. And he has other great qualities too. So it's not like Todd and Mike are twins, they're not. But Mike provides that same kind of environment. And I feel fortunate to be in a place where accountability is sacred. And there's never a moment that you're confused about

what needs to happen and what the outcome needs to be. I've worked for other leaders in my career where there was ambiguity all the time. And candidly, that's really hard to be a part of. And I do my best to make sure that I'm modeling that behavior that I get out of folks like out of Todd, out of Mike, out of other folks in my career. Mark Anderson at Palo Alto Networks is a great example. Earlier in my career, David Lockett at Dell.

with somebody that had that same approach. And I've had other leaders too, so I could probably name 20 names and so forgive all the people that I didn't just mention. But these ones jumped to mind because of that approach and combining analytics and behaviors is a lot of what leading a successful revenue organization is about. You have to have both. And so thanks for asking that question. So I'll make sure and call Todd.

Mark Petruzzi (19:44)

Yeah, you described that really well. So Joss, through many of your companies you've worked with, you've lived through significant change and cultural shifts as well and acquisitions and putting companies together. What did you learn during those times about keeping teams motivated and effective during times of change?

Joshua Hoffman (20:04)

Well, there's a couple of things. Now I have been fortunate. Most of those times of change have been about rapid rocket ship kind of growth and how that impacts an organization. I know that one of the lessons that I've learned and one that I try and live, although again, not always perfectly, is my behavior doesn't change ⁓ almost no matter what the situation. The message may change. The requirements or the outcomes may change.

but my behavior doesn't change. Nobody has to worry about schizophrenic Josh. There's an opportunity to know that there'll be a level of consistency there. The other thing is about making sure that people understand that change isn't necessarily bad. If you go back to the days of like corn fairy and FYI and the introduction of these competencies into the corporate world, I got to live through being one of the guinea pigs for that.

One of the competencies was dealing with ambiguity. And getting the chance to teach that, to share with people the sort of the pieces that fit into dealing with ambiguity ⁓ is helpful. And giving people a future that makes sense to them, that change can lead to better things, you have to be consistent in that message. Now,

by the way, there's times where change doesn't lead to that. I've been parts of organizations that did layoffs. I've been parts of organizations that were bought. And maybe that wasn't the best thing in people's eyes at the time. But it doesn't mean that the culture of the organization has to change. Candidly, everybody has to be a part of that. And that's one of the other key messages is that change doesn't have to happen to you. You can be part.

of what makes things better and that you should feel empowered, you should feel emboldened, you should feel like you have a voice, you should feel listened to. And the other skill that I think comes with that is having compassion. You have to have empathy to be successful in any leadership role. If you don't have that, one, you gotta go find it. Two, you really do have to be able to put yourself in their shoes and say,

What are they feeling based on this message? What are they thinking right now? How do I answer questions before they're even asked? And the more you can get ahead of things, the better off things will be.

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In Part 2 of our conversation with Max Elster, Co-Founder and CEO of Minoa, we go deeper into how sales teams are actually operationalizing outcome-based selling; at scale.

Max shares how revenue teams at companies like Vanta are moving beyond founder-led, feature-centric narratives, and building scalable, repeatable playbooks rooted in customer outcomes, business impact, and data-backed storytelling.

Whether you’re leading a 10-person sales team or a 1,000-person GTM org, this conversation will help you reimagine enablement, coach for value, and build business cases that win over CFOs.

What You’ll Learn

• Vanta’s Transition from Features to Outcomes: How CRO Stevie Case transformed Vanta’s narrative, and drove shorter cycles, higher win rates, and stronger executive engagement by focusing the team on value-led discovery and storytelling.
• Why Business Cases Shouldn’t Be Optional: Hear how teams went from building 10 business cases per quarter to over 500, without hiring hundreds of SEs, and how that shift boosted win rates by up to 15 percentage points.
• Teaching Reps to Think Like CFOs: Max explains how the best sales teams equip champions to model ROI and outcomes with buyers, not for them, and why the strongest business cases are co-owned with the finance team.
• How AI Accelerates Discovery, Coaching, and Differentiation: From call summaries to intent signals to customer benchmarks, Max shows how LLMs and predictive tools are giving reps the context to build relevance at scale, without losing the human touch.

Key Topics

• From founder-led sales to repeatable revenue engines
• Vanta’s shift to value-led selling, and what it unlocked
• Building outcome plans that close deals faster
• Why the CRO’s best insights come from AEs
• Coaching for customer outcomes, not product demos
• How AI is reshaping forecasting, discovery, and enablement
• The real future of revenue leadership in an AI world

Guest Spotlight: Max Elster

Max Elster is the Co-Founder and CEO of Minoa, a revenue platform helping companies scale value-based sales across the deal cycle. With a decade of experience in AI and B2B SaaS, Max works with companies like Vanta, Cognite, and others to operationalize value intelligence, from discovery to renewal.

Resources & Mentions

• Book: The Qualified Sales Leader by John McMahon
• Company: Vanta
• Max Elster: LinkedIn | Email: [email protected]

🎧 Listen now and subscribe to Selling the Cloud wherever you get your podcasts. Stay tuned for next week’s episode!

Mark Petruzzi (00:36)

So let's move to topic three, stories from the field, moving from features to outcomes. So I have heard you say how you've worked with Vanta's CRO on shifting from feature led to value led sales. Walk us through that story.

Max Elster (00:52)

Yeah, I think it's a great example. Stevie, who is Vanta's chief revenue officer, she came from Twilio in the past and came to Vanta's organization, around probably somewhere between like the 20 and 40 million AR range. like basically Vanta is a good example, right? They initially were, basically kind of building this idea around a trust management platform and compliance and the importance of security and compliance with startups.

And then they expanded over time. one important thing was that as they have more competition, they need to differentiate themselves. they basically, one way of differentiating is to focus on value, right? So Stevie came in and she talked about this publicly as well, many different times where she said that one of the most important things that she drove as an organization was evolving the company from a feature led organization, the initial founder led sales days to...

basically focusing the company on value selling and moving away from feature to an outcome led and value led story across the board, pre-sales to post-sales. And then of course it starts with changing your narrative. It starts with changing the decks that you're creating. It starts with making sure that every single seller can talk about the business case and the value that in this case, Vanta provides different than their competitors are oftentimes against StatusCrow, So why should I do anything about the specific initiative here?

And they have seen great success, And actually making that transition, but ultimately I would put it even into a larger scope. any successful company out there, whether you look at the old days, the SAP is the oracles, or whether you look into modern companies, Databricks, Snowflake, many of the other kind of modern go-to-market tech organization, like go-to-market teams, they all rely on the value principle and they all operationalize their thinking around how do we make sure that everybody can speak to.

value across the board, not just pre-sales but also post-sales. And Vant has a good example where Steve done a great example at also articulating that a way. And yes, I think they're a great customer of ours. We're very happy to have them then kind of go take the ride with them. But I think they're just a great example of how they have transitioned. And the outcomes are incredible, rent rates go up, sales cycles go down.

You can actually make sure that everybody is more proficient at articulating the value that you're driving. So even thinking about discounts, especially in very competitive markets where you want to avoid discounting every single deal, And if you can uniquely position value to a procurement team, that's going to help you actually have that conversation over your competition.

KK Anderson (03:01)

And all of that is stemmed from having outcome plans and business cases in that kind of value intelligence layer as you describe it. that the sellers are talking to outcomes and talking so that they can then derive the value to lead the sale.

Max Elster (03:15)

a good example of company, a couple thousand employees where have actually measured that they built mutually created over 500 business cases a quarter. And before it was almost basically 10 to 30, In a quarter where individual SEs were building business cases to support the sellers. In a future world, basically every seller will be able to

build a business case, have that being automated and have it readily available to them for every single deal. So what happens was that actually we saw that VIN rates go up six to sometimes even 15 percentage points for specific segments, which was incredible. And it's less because you bring a business case late into the deal and you try to justify the value to a procurement person. It's more of there's a process and a guidance for an SDR or a seller or an SE to talk about value earlier. It's almost like

teaching a kid kind of basically ride the bike. If you give them a little bit of a guidance of how to start with, they will do it themselves. And it's similar, in value where if you teach them that the end result will be you driving the bike or you actually closing more deals, they will kind of think backwards and think about, if I just need to get to a final business case that includes a few different questions I need to ask, but that will help me and the customer and the champion have an internal story they can tell to their buying committee.

I can do that, I can make sure that every single discovery call has these like three to four questions that would help me then shape a better narrative as we go along the sales cycle. And then it's becoming a routine and a habit, right? And as soon as it's a habit, it can actually get scaled and be successful across the company.

Mark Petruzzi (04:43)

So Max, how did these stories resonate differently with executive buyers like CFOs who we all know scrutinize every purchase?

Max Elster (04:52)

looking at, have a few CFOs in our advisory board and I always say the CFOs will do it themselves if you don't do it for them. So they will run internal projections and internal business cases themselves. And if they don't believe in it, then they are the ultimate gatekeeper and they can just say, no, I don't believe in this. So as a seller, you're either destined to keep it up to them and you can't control it or you do it yourself. And you can control the outcome plan and the business case you're presenting to them.

or equipping a champion ideally to do that. And we have a couple of interesting stories where sellers have actually reached back to us and said that the executive, whether it's a CFO, it's a CSOR, whether it's a CIO, they actually came into the application and they almost modeled the assumptions to the base minimum. So they came in and tried to understand if we almost have no success here, what is the minimum value? And they compared that internally to other initiatives and projects that they are currently exploring.

And it resulted almost a CFO to have ownership and accountability on the business case, Because they actually control the assumptions and the narrative and they're doing it based on the framework that the vendor provides to them. And it just changes the dynamic. I also say,

I don't think a CFO is kind of this alien on the other side that doesn't want to talk to you, But they want to see that you can relate to them. They want to see that you have experience dealing with similar businesses and the more you can do that proactively, the better. And yes, I think I had CFO conversations where I presented them a business case and they said, I don't believe in this number. And then I went back and said, okay, then tell me what you believe in. And then I think like you almost opened up the room and you have a conversation about a mutual goal that you're trying to go after and you find a good solution.

It brings everybody closer together. think that's the ultimate desire of running a good sales process.

KK Anderson (06:25)

Really, really interesting. Okay, let's move to topic number four, which I know is a really hot topic with our audience. And that is the future of revenue leadership in an AI world. So I've heard you say in a previous conversation that many CROs, and I agree, fear their jobs because of AI and how quickly things are changing. And I just.

I want to get your perspective, but do you think that is?

Max Elster (06:50)

Uncertainty is always a difficult thing for us humans, Some get excited by it, but the majority of people get afraid of uncertainty and not knowing what the future beholds. And I think that's the scenario right now where things are moving so quickly and it's hard to estimate where it's going and how you potentially react to it or how your competitors potentially are reacting that you're missing out on, right? That I think a lot of people either start almost freezing, And they start

Not to move. that's a risk or they start to move too quickly. they make like, test a lot, but they don't make fundamental decisions about which AI solutions or strategies do I deploy and what's the underlying reason for that. think a lot of people are just trying to move and make a decision, but they actually forget about what I'm actually trying to solve in, my process and, kind of my day to day execution with my teams.

And which solutions and vendors and strategies and data plays do I want to run in order to make sure that that can actually get accomplished? AI hasn't really changed that, ultimately it's going back to kind of yourself first and thinking about which problems do I want to solve for my revenue team? And then how do I apply the right AI solutions to that? I do think though that the quality of LLMs today give us an enormous opportunity to tap into

unstructured data sources and data sources that have previously been so messy and so complex to analyze that it's going to open up a lot of more opportunities to improve your day-to-day work, whether it's one individual seller, or whether it's a CRO trying to almost run better analytics around the idea of, for example, why do we win? Why do we lose? Why do think there's so much data there that actually has never really been tapped into that now is possible with LLMs? But I would say

It's going back to the fundamentals of thinking which strategies do you want to change? What are the underlying solutions and options that you have? then deploying and testing the ones that feel most suited for that particular purpose. And I think you will be successful, it's just probably give it a bit of time to, have everyone adjust it. But then it's a new reality that we all work with. I'm sure you too see it with your clients as well every single day, Where you help them have those conversations internally.

KK Anderson (08:48)

see AI reshaping all of these different roles of the direct level team members? So the sellers are obviously on chat, GPT all over the place. They're using AI inside a gong. They're using generative AI. The leaders are using predictive AI.

AEs, SCRs, like what are the big ones that stand out to you?

Max Elster (09:10)

I mean, we all become more intelligent, right? think that's kind of, we all essentially, we have ourselves and then we put an additional intelligence layer on top of that, which is gonna make us a smarter seller. It's gonna make us a smarter advisor to our customers. It's gonna make us more credible, more relatable because we can actually tell stories that are similar to what others have seen. So think that's very tactical. think sellers start to tap into those resources of previous deals, previous conversations. So do think about,

Gong or the respective call recorder that you're using in the past, you didn't have an opportunity to get an account level overview of 150 plus conversations, Of like what actually is kind of the underlying executive summary around this particular account. Now it's possible, right? Because you have all those conversations that can feed into Gong summaries or kind of other tools that you're using in order to help prompt yourself for a business case, help yourself prompt for a better...

code outbound, you're sending whatever you're doing in your sales process that can actually get leveraged by those individual call recordings. what we're seeing is that a lot of the forecasting providers are starting to open up their signals to more and more data points, which is interesting. If you think about your forecast, maybe in the past, it was limited by how well your Salesforce fields were filled out. think nowadays you can tap into many more signals and data sources around an individual account. Not just the conversations that you're having, but also

Did they fire executives in the past two weeks, right? That could potentially impact your deal, right? Or it could risk the forecast. And all these different data points can now be merged and made accessible in your day to day, whether you're a chief revenue officer that runs the forecasting process with your sales manager. So whether it's an AE trying to become a more intelligent seller and more credible seller and advisor to your prospects. I think that's where AI is just getting started,

started my first company back in 2019 where we built speech technology with natural language processing. And I remember back in the days that we were competing with Google and AWS on some first speech models. And it was incredibly difficult and almost hard to actually transcript a meeting. Nowadays, we talked six years later and we have almost perfect transcripts for almost every single language in the world. We can take those data points and put them into other sources, ask questions around it. It's pretty crazy, but also pretty exciting.

I think opportunity for go-to-market teams to truly advance and be even more customer oriented than what they were a few years ago.

Mark Petruzzi (11:23)

So Max, what happens when every company has great AI building tools? What will still allow differentiation amongst the best revenue leaders?

Max Elster (11:34)

listening and building strong relationships. we're to go back to, core human strengths and qualities where we were social animals, And we want to come together and learn from each other. And I think that's what AI gives us more opportunity to not do cumbersome work that you would otherwise be spending a lot of time on and actually focus on how can you drive.

better conversations with customers and how can you potentially show up more often, Maybe take that flight and just be with your customer and spend time with them, get to know them and make sure that you bring all the information that would be helpful with you. But all that information is there, You just need to tap into that and then you can focus on the actual conversation and trying to understand the other side better. it gives us an enormous ability to actually be closer to what we're supposed to be doing and not just typing letters on the computer.

that's a great opportunity, but also it's a big opportunity will be to almost let the team run a little bit. Everybody's worried right now that teams are using chat, JBT and other systems. it gave everybody a first stint of what is possible with AI. And I often suggest to let people run and explore themselves. And at some point you grab everyone together and say, let's talk about the kind of individual projects that you've always tried out at home, On the weekends, during the week, like what are the things that have been, been working for you and how can we.

now build a system around it that we can scale across the company because otherwise we're to be running around like headless chicken and everybody's going to be doing their own thing. But it's actually not solidified in one neutral story that you can execute on. And I remember a few years ago, everybody talked about great customer experiences. And I think we kind of come back to that again now where everybody had some internal runs on AI technology. And now it's probably getting everyone back in the room and thinking about what actually works. What do we want to deploy? What do we want to scale?

KK Anderson (13:09)

But after work, what is the point?

Max Elster (13:11)

I think that's kind of phase two of the AI go-to-market story right now.

KK Anderson (13:15)

I feel like AI is going to help the sales profession get back to what it originally was, which was building relationships and trust and credibility and having the time before we had all of these tools and technologies and everything had to be inputted into CRM. And, there was so much admin, before those days, was, your Rolodex and who you knew.

And it was the relationships and that was the value, the value that you had as a salesperson. And now with AI being able to take so much of the busy work back, it's like you can focus again now on relationships. I always, mean, shoot, you can even use different generative AI tools as like your assistant, like your strategist and ask questions like, Hey, I'm thinking about this customer. I'm thinking about this challenge they have.

Max Elster (13:56)

Mm-hmm.

KK Anderson (14:01)

What are some questions that I can ask? what are some, just ask questions as if you're talking to like a sales coach, right? That's too.

Max Elster (14:07)

like different projects in ChatGBT and other tools where I kind of built those individual projects for me, I have a product coach who's advising me on how do I best navigate a new product idea. I have basically almost like a company coach that's helping me think about culture and strategy and then have a sales coach, That's helping me on some more tactical piece on go-to-market.

And I'm kind continuously building that out as, we speak, I have an investor kind of related one where it helped me craft a good investor update. So there's many different sorts of these like micro projects that you can build. And you bring up a good point though of like, ultimately it's about the relationships. And I often compare that with what happened in coding, Which is actually moving at a faster pace right now as go to market, essentially what engineers are doing now is they work with cursor in order to automate some of the work around.

writing code, And what happens is they come back to their core strengths, which is thinking about engineering problems and thinking about product problems and talking to your peers about that. And then the actual writing of code can be automated or at least partly automated, And you can have more time thinking about the solutions and the scoping of that, which is a more important task and the actual writing of it, So I think that's going to be an interesting.

time where I coding kind of you can see that that's almost like a little bit of a headwind they already had of time and then go to market will follow. And it's going to be built around the relationships as you said, specifically in go to market, it's going to come to the core strengths of what the individual kind of people are actually doing in their function and department. Hopefully, I mean, that's maybe I'm an optimist hopefully in this regard.

KK Anderson (15:33)

the engines that you're using are selling the cloud listeners and reading our newsletter and recommending that you come and be on our podcast. We're so glad that you're here today. And I know that you have been a listener as well. So for the CROs that are listening today, what's the one thing, and it's gonna be hard to boil it down into one, but what's the one thing that they can do to future-proof their role?

Max Elster (15:44)

Thank you.

KK Anderson (15:59)

in the age of AI. The first thing they should do.

Max Elster (16:01)

I would say the first thing that they should do is I would pick 20 sellers and I would like the first thing I would probably do tomorrow if I would be a chief revenue officer right now, I would go into like a channel and say, Hey, I'm actually curious to learn from my team, whether it's 20 people or 50 people. What are the AI applications that they've built at home during the work time and have 15 minute conversations for every single one of them.

and learn what they're doing and why they're doing it. And note every single action, note every single problem that they're trying to solve and then aggregate it at the end and think about a strategy that you can then deploy to everyone else. Because I think a lot of sellers are already doing something and they would love to, tell their story of what they have been experimenting with through the chief revenue officer and the chief revenue officer can future proof themselves to build a strategy around that, but also then guide and lead the managers below them to execute on that strategy.

Often it's talking to the sellers. They're the ones that are testing a lot. I think actually reducing the width between the chief revenue officer and the AEs would help them get more future-proof and understand what's actually possible with AI. So that's probably what I would do tomorrow if I were a chief revenue officer.

Mark Petruzzi (17:03)

That's great. Well Max, this has been a great discussion. Do you mind if we jump into a few rapid fire questions? Our audience loves them Cool. So what was the first product or service you have ever sold?

Max Elster (17:12)

Of course.

It was actually a ticket management software that was sold to event organizers and clubs in 2015.

Mark Petruzzi (17:24)

Nice.

KK Anderson (17:24)

Okay, who's your favorite CRO or CEO that you like to follow?

Max Elster (17:29)

That's a good question.

I'm a big fan of Patrick Olsen at Stripe. I think they've done an incredible job building the company, the culture, the go-to market as well for a company that initially was built out of almost like a one bedroom apartment and now became, I think, is it now, 50, 60 billion company, Fintech. great company. The person that I admire for the work he has done in the team.

Mark Petruzzi (17:51)

What about a leadership or go to market practice that you believe every sales, marketing, executive leader should adopt?

Max Elster (17:59)

principles of the qualified sales leader. I've re-read it again, John McMahan's book. I think it's kind of the Bible and the principles for a lot of the thinking that we have building our product, Thinking about value and outcomes and making sure that it follows through. But the best go-to-market organizations have applied some form of the qualified sales leader's principles that John McMahan and the team.

in the early days of BMC and Blade Logic and some of those companies have initially built and it still stays true today. he's on the board at Snowflake, Building the next $100 billion company plus and it stays true. So I think that's a great principle. would definitely read the book or take some summaries in order to develop our thinking.

KK Anderson (18:38)

I can't wait to check that one out. We'll put it in the notes as well. my favorite question. Advice that you would give your 21 year old self.

Max Elster (18:44)

I would probably say is to ask a lot of stupid questions and learn from others. when I look back over kind of the last like 10 years or so, think it's, I always try to kind of reach out to different people that were great in their qualities. And I try to just say, hey, I'm a person trying to learn about the field that you operate in, and I have a few questions and usually people are actually very happy to talk about themselves and in a good way.

I think they, if you ask the right questions and they can tell about their stories and how they made decisions, they will open up and they will become mentors. They will become friends. And I think that's something where, if I think about the probably thousands of conversations I've had, think oftentimes it's just being curious and asking more questions that will help you become more curious about yourself, but then also you learn from others and you can apply those tactics in your day to day, whether it's on a professional or on personal site. And

People are very open to help, you just need to ask for it.

Mark Petruzzi (19:31)

Excellent. Max, this has been so informative and so enjoyable. Thank you for taking the time with us. Where can our audience find you if they're looking to get in touch, learn more about the company? What are their best ways?

Max Elster (19:46)

Yeah, LinkedIn is great. So I'm available on LinkedIn, maxelster, or if you want to send me an email, it's max at minoa.io. So pretty easily accessible there. Just send me an email and happy to find some time.

Mark Petruzzi (19:56)

Perfect, thank you again, Max.

Max Elster (19:58)

Awesome. Thank you too. was great and incredible questions.

KK Anderson (20:01)

Thanks Max.

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, Max Elster, Co-Founder and CEO of Minoa, joins co-hosts Mark Petruzzi and KK Anderson to explore what B2B revenue leaders often miss: a clear, consistent understanding of why they win.

Max introduces the concept of a Value Intelligence Layer, a data-driven framework that links discovery, business cases, and outcomes into a single narrative that everyone from SDRs to CROs can use.

Drawing from years of experience across SaaS and enterprise sales, Max shares how leading GTM teams are moving away from feature pitching and toward outcome-led selling, especially in a world where AI has made building software easier, and differentiation harder.

From strengthening discovery questions to creating scalable outcome playbooks, this episode is packed with tactical ideas for revenue leaders rethinking how they sell in the age of AI.

What You’ll Learn

• The “Why We Win” Blindspot: Why many sales orgs still can’t answer the most important question, and how that gap leads to poor qualification, forecasting, and deal execution.
• From Features to Outcomes: How modern buyers evaluate value, and why understanding customer priorities matters more than your internal product roadmap.
• Creating the Value Intelligence Layer: How to unify customer impact, product usage, sales stages, and discovery insights into a single GTM operating model.
• Scaling Outcome-Led Playbooks: What it takes to align SDRs, AEs, SEs, and CS teams around a shared value narrative from day zero to renewal.
• AI as a Differentiator (Not a Replacement): Why the best teams use AI to personalize engagement, not to automate it, and how AI helps surface deeper buyer context.

Key Topics

• Why most GTM teams don’t know why they win
• Building discovery questions that lead to business cases
• Embedding outcomes into CRM and sales stages
• Creating a “value intelligence” system across teams
• How AI and call data can power more relevant sales motions
• Turning post-sale value into pre-sale advantage
• Aligning playbooks across SDRs, AEs, SEs, and CSMs

Guest Spotlight: Max Elster

Max Elster is the Co-Founder and CEO of Minoa, a SaaS company helping revenue teams operationalize their value story. With a background in B2B software and product development, Max built Manoa to bridge the gap between feature-led selling and outcome-driven growth. His team helps sales orgs unify discovery, use cases, and customer impact into one connected system.

Resources & Mentions

• Book: The Qualified Sales Leader by John McMahon
• Company: Minoa.io 
• Max’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/maxelster

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

Mark Petruzzi (00:36)

Welcome to today's episode of Selling the Cloud podcast. We're excited to welcome Max Elster, co-founder and CEO of Manoa. Max has spent nearly a decade in B2B software and AI. He co-founded Manoa to solve a critical gap he observed across SaaS and enterprise companies that most revenue leaders don't actually know why they win. Manoa helps teams uncover the value

drivers behind deals, building what Max calls a value intelligence level, layer rather, that connects discovery, business cases, and customer outcomes into one system. Today, Max will share how CROs can shift from feature-led selling to outcome-led value selling, and what it means to scale revenue teams when differentiation and ROI storytelling are more important than ever.

So we'll cover four themes today. Why the old sales playbook falls short, building the value intelligence layer, stories from the field moving from features to outcomes, and the future of revenue leadership in an AI world. Max, welcome to Selling the Cloud. Thank you so much for joining us.

Max Elster (01:46)

It's great being here with both of you. As you know, I've been an avid listener and kind of follower of your newsletter. So it's an honor to be here and speak a bit about Valley Intelligence.

Mark Petruzzi (01:57)

Well, it's an honor to have you here as well. So topic one, why the old sales playbook falls short. So Max, you said CROs often can't clearly answer why they win. Why is this such a big problem today?

Max Elster (02:09)

been particularly relevant, I think, over the last couple of years, right, when we came out of basically post-COVID world and everybody was almost adjusting to a new environment, a new set of buying, a new set of selling. And oftentimes what we see is that companies understand the what and the how. They understand which deals they work on. They understand their internal sales process. They understand the RICP. They understand the different stages, of course, in order to

get a lead to a close one opportunity. But oftentimes what we see that actually they don't know enough about is why they win and why they lose. So what are the underlying criteria that helps the chief revenue officer detect whether an opportunity is truly qualified? what are the data, what's the previous data that actually helps you make a good call of whether a certain deal will close or not? And what are the underlying value drivers, use cases that you're selling and how do they relate to?

the conversation around the outcome. you're trying to deliver and then how can you reverse that back to why your customer is actually buying or not? And oftentimes the, the why is not really clear to a lot of revenue teams, the what and the how it's pretty, pretty set and pretty default, understandable, but the why is often what's missing and what, what's the consequence of that is that sellers start to, start to basically just rely on more like deal heroics, right? They look into like previous deals, they feel rather confident about a deal, but they don't actually know.

is this deal going to close because of actual factual reasons of why other customers that have been similar to this particular account have closed in the past? And that's a massive gap and more revenue teams are starting to ask that question of why do we actually win and why do we lose on a basis of understanding your use cases and your deployment of use cases better.

KK Anderson (03:42)

So that's really interesting. When I think of a huge misconception with salespeople that we have seen, every day for 25 years, it's that a salesperson believes that their primary job is educating about that product, describing the features and advantages of using that product. And it's all about how quickly can I talk about what I'm selling when really

the primary goal of a salesperson is to listen and to understand and to figure out what are their outcomes, what are their business problems, what do they need to fix, do they have a pain they need to fix? And then, and only then, can you go into why you, why now, why this feature, why this benefit, et cetera. And so when I think about

you're right. All of these sales organizations have all of those tacticals in place and button down the process, the tools, et cetera. but they probably, those that are more successful are the ones that are selling to outcomes, right? The ones that are, answering or solving a problem with, and that's why they win. Right. That's, that's kind of where my, where my head is going. And so.

When you see sales leaders who are relying on features and broad messaging and educating buyers, what gets lost in the conversation?

Max Elster (04:56)

it's great question. mean, we've, we've analyzed over like tens and thousands of different conversations, call recording data, but also business cases that are being built with customers, outcome plans, sales. Right. And I think a lot of the actual sauce that's missing is around the business priorities. Everybody talks about the features and functions, but when you go a level deeper or a level more like basically a level higher, you kind of uncover business priorities, right. And you can map.

individual functionality and individual features to those business priorities that matter to that organization. And I think five, six years ago, you could probably still sell on feature and function and product. And having been a product kind of manager by background, right? I think that's kind of what drives an organization, right? It's features that are released. gets everyone excited about the new products that are being launched that you can sell to customers. But when you look at it from a buyer's angle, they don't care too much about your internal release thoughts.

They care about their problems that they need to solve and then how your individual use cases map to their problems. And I think what specifically happened, I would say, in the last 12 months, and I think that's why this topic becomes more relevant than ever, is that a lot of revenue teams see that their competition is not sleeping either. And I think it's because of AI. It's becoming easier and easier to build. There's going to be an abundance of software in the future where essentially every...

person out of a single bedroom is going to be able to ship a product and actually release it to an audience. And yes, there will be differences between you as an incumbent or you as a player that's been in a category for a long time, but you need to make sure that you can display and communicate your differentiated value drivers better than the person that's building a new software out of a kind of one bedroom apartment. And I think that's kind of what's becoming evident right now that a lot of the data that we are looking at.

really showcases that the sellers that are performing better are first understanding the business priorities and then actually map them back to the individual use cases that map to their persona, that map to that individual use case and the industries that they're targeting. And ultimately in a world of AI, it's more important than ever to be more differentiated and understanding the business priorities and linking that back to your unique differentiated value is the only answer on how you can solve that problem because everybody's going to be able to build sooner or later.

Mark Petruzzi (07:06)

So Max, building a sort of a moat is gonna get more more important because you're gonna have to do it with your products, you're gonna have to do it with your processes, and you're certainly gonna have to do it the way you sell to your clients going forward. So what does it look like to move from feature function selling to outcome selling, especially at scale?

Max Elster (07:28)

Right. Yeah, mean, we work with companies that have thousands of employees, right? And they are spread across multiple different regions and languages and countries. I think scale is often the biggest question, right? Of ultimately trying to move away from individual pitch decks and individual messages that maybe sellers have put onto a spreadsheet and try and iterate on to something that can be unified across an organization. Essentially asking the question of how can

Every SDR to the AE, to the sales engineer, to the customer success manager, even thinking about account management, talk about the same language and talk about the same value that this organization is delivering to customers. And I think there are very tactical pieces of how you can change that. think the underlying theme definitely is that it is a change management process, right? You have to educate your team on a new narrative that buying is going to be different and sellers have to adjust to that new buying cycle and the way that buyers actually evaluate software.

But on the other side, they're very tactical things that I think you probably also have an interesting perspective on that you can, you can build. One of them is how do you build better outcome led playbooks, right? When you're delivering and you do discovery, how do you make sure that before you even jump into feature and functionality, what are the discovery questions that are related to an individual persona that you're going to be talking to? How do you capture metrics as early as in the discovery and not just wait until you want to prepare a proposal to gather metrics that help you then.

create a solid business case for the CFO, right? Like actually building those playbooks and almost moving everything early into the cycle and not just waiting until the CFO question comes around of, can you kind of make sure that I understand what am I buying here, right? What's the ROI? What's the outcome plan? What's the net present value in this opportunity? And making sure that a lot of those questions can be built into discovery playbooks where you already start gathering. And I always say like mutually lining on.

the outcomes that you're trying to deliver. The champion on the other side is not an enemy, right? They have the same interests as you. If they're excited about the opportunity, they want to be part of the creation of understanding how your solution maps to the pain points and the priorities of the organization. And they want to help you with that, but you have to ask the right questions in order to get them there. And then I had a conversation this morning where I talked to a sales leader out of Europe. She manages a couple of ⁓ sellers that then have sales managers. And what she said is that

Discovery starts in the outbound message, right? And how do you make sure that the data that you already have about the outcomes you deliver and the why of why customers renew and expand, how can you make sure that an SCR can talk about that, right? And if they talk to an executive in their outreach or they call somebody on a cold call, they want to have, make sure that they have those benchmarks and those data points available. And that's often where organizations are just under high scrutiny right now to just bring all that together.

And of course the data economy kind of, think, gives the answer to that. There's so much in an organization at scale that people are not leveraging that they are considering as we speak.

KK Anderson (10:15)

Really interesting. So what advice would you give a CRO who has a sneaking suspicion that their current sales playbook is falling short? Where would you start? ⁓

Max Elster (10:27)

think probably the

first couple of things that they need to be looking at is pick your first, like pick your most successful like top 10 deals over the last quarter or last six months and talk to those sellers and understand, okay, can you walk me through how did you position the unique value of our organization compared to the differential compared to status quo and let the sellers answer that question, right? And oftentimes there's a lot of ⁓ insight in how they positioned why.

this particular organization is different than others. And ⁓ it's just making sure that those individual wins that have already had great success ⁓ or the specific expansion deals that you're working on, how can you make sure that you'd templatize that and build a playbook around it from discovery questions that you could ask and enable sellers to work on to the renewal conversation where you're trying to basically expand with somebody on additional use cases. And I would always start with kind of where do you win and where do you lose and make assumptions around that.

and then make sure that you align the company on those individual success stories. And then it's a process, of continuously picking the winners every single quarter and making sure that you re-communicate again and again why this method is important so that the more junior sellers or the people that are just getting rammed can take those wins and the underlying ⁓ outcome stories and outcome maps that you've built for customers as an example for their internal processes and their opportunities that they work on. And that's just, of course, a very tactical piece, but I think

looking at like, even like running reports and Salesforce and picking a few of your kind of recent deals and talking to those sellers often creates a unified story of what you can actually scale towards the rest of the team. And then I always say, when companies come to me and they ask, okay, how can we even get started? I always say, and sometimes it's companies that make like 50 to like a billion in revenue, right? Like 50 million to a billion in revenue. And they come to me and say, okay, how do we understand what are our value drivers?

And I often say, what do mean, right? You have had some great success getting to 400 million in AR, right? And there's probably some, some KPIs that you're tracking well along that in order to make sure that you're delivering value and you've gotten to that point of time. But what a lot of organizations are I think overseeing is that the customer success organization and the account management teams, they are trying to renew with customers based on the value that you're delivering. And they are somewhat trying to tie the story between the outcomes the customer is interested in and your product and taking those and actually building playbooks for the pre-sales team.

can be an incredible starting point because otherwise we wouldn't be renewing and expanding with customers.

KK Anderson (12:47)

You can even use that data with the existing team to figure out who are the right people they should be spending their time with. the old 820 rule, 80 % of ⁓ sellers are spending their time on the wrong accounts, right? So let's move on to the second topic here.

Max Elster (13:03)

Spot on. Spot on.

KK Anderson (13:06)

and kind of focused around building the value intelligence layer. So you describe the importance of creating a value intelligence layer. But what does that really mean in practice? Like, is that a tangible thing? Is it a process? What does that really mean in practice?

Max Elster (13:23)

Yeah, I mean, how we would

describe it and kind of the definition for the value intelligence layer is essentially trying to find a way to better map the features that your products basically have accommodated and map them to individual outcomes of customers and then relate them back to what does customer impact look like, right? And this could be even a simple, like you go into a spreadsheet, yours is a chief revenue officer. You know which products or which features are most popular within.

kind of your individual user group, and you try to map them to the outcomes that you want your sellers to drive within your customers' accounts. And you refer that back to then, ideally, customer impact, right? How do these individual outcomes that map to the features actually help somebody drive impact within their companies? that's measurable on the post-sale side. That's measurable on, like, if you look at product telemetry data, right? Are people actually leveraging the features within your product that actually result in

dedicated outcomes across your organization. And that's, think it's essentially building that single source of truth in order to understand how does an individual feature connect to a customer impact and how do you make sure that when you talk to a prospect, you can go into a conversation and say, this is apparently the problem that you're trying to go after. This is the outcome that you're trying to go after. want to reduce costs in 2026. have.

different use cases that accommodate that, right? That I would love to walk you through and understand whether that's helpful, right? Whether that's like the potential use cases that could be deployed in your organization. And you almost open up the room. I'm not sure if you've ever used a car configurator in the past where you can kind of configure your Porsche or the BMW or the Mercedes that you would like to explore. It's almost similar to that, right? You open up a shared space and you try to explore the future car that you want to buy. And you want to do something ideally with the prospect as well, where you talk about

This is kind of the value intelligence that we have built. These are the features that we have. This is the outcomes that we usually drive with customers. And this is the proof and the customer stories and the impact that we're succeeding with with customers. So it spans from pre-sales to post-sales. It's essentially this unified layer. it helps, that data layer helps to create better business case because every business case will not just talk about features and functions, but it will also relate back to the customer impact. It will help an outcome plan, right? Everybody talks about.

mutual success plans on the wholesale side, they will not just be individual checklist items anymore, right? They will actually be basically deployments, right? Which use cases did we deploy and how can we make sure that we measure them quarter by quarter, month by month or year by year to say this customer is actually on track. We're not just seeing whether they're using our features, but we actually see whether they are delivering the outcomes and we're working with our customers to keep ourselves accountable.

And I can tell a good story there. Actually, one of our customers, Cognite, is a leading software AI manufacturing company. A couple hundred million AI are a pretty successful category leader. And their Northstar internally is to drive customer value. And everything basically that aligns within the organization is around that principle of driving the Northstar, which is helping a customer succeed and deploy the right use cases and making sure that not just

The customer success manager can talk about the value, but also the customer can go internally and say, we deployed these four use cases with Cognite. That's how they operate. This is how successful they are. This is where we still see gaps. And you almost keep yourself and the customer accountable on a mutual story of how you are succeeding with them. And it's building a different narrative. You're almost handing over the relationship of customer impact also to the customer. It's not just a vendor.

specific relation that you're trying to build. it's really vice versa. You're trying to mutually succeed and both parties have to understand how the feature usage relates to the impact that you can get from a vendor specifically.

Mark Petruzzi (16:48)

So Max, take us a little deeper in how do you pull data from systems like Salesforce, Gong, and general call transcripts to fuel this layer?

Max Elster (16:58)

Yeah, of interesting ones. So one big layer that we tap into are case studies and any existing successful stories that you have, right? Where you've essentially articulated the problem that you're trying to solve for a customer and the relatable metrics that go along with it. Some companies have a better case study system than others, right? Some companies are still very feature oriented in their case studies, but it's a good starting point at least, right? To then say, okay, this is what the case studies say. Another data point is Gong where

we pull or like any sort of call recorder, right? ⁓ Where we pull call transcripts and make sure that we can map the talk tracks of a seller or an account manager to these individual case studies and the results that you have seen with other customers, right? So that's another big data point. The third data point is Salesforce, where a lot of organizations have some sort of overview on the medic or a med pic or a spiced scenarios of what is the problem we're solving? What are the metrics associated with that? Right? And all these different data points.

are essentially fueling this customer value intelligence layer. And you could almost see it as like a small database, right? Like on a, that's not like where like all that information is gathered and summarized. whenever an SDR wants to send an outbound message, they query that database, right? And they can say, Hey, I'm targeting Kristen at a Pepsi at PepsiCo, right? And she's this persona, she works in this department. What should I send to her? Which relatable customer stories can I bring up in my cold email or in my cold call?

that actually would relate to her job and the problems that she's potentially facing, right? Or there's another account manager that taps into that same quote unquote database where they're trying to now expand with an existing customer and think about what are the additional use cases I could deploy. And then that database will help to make sure that you can find your path in upselling and cross-selling the next use cases and the next products that you can offer. And essentially that, like those different data points are continuously fueling.

the quality of your value intelligence layer, the more calls we have, the more case studies that are being released. Of course, the better the system gets over time and the better it can actually help organizations communicate outcomes over features.

KK Anderson (18:54)

So it's almost like a generative AI interface for your querying and asking questions. Is it also listening to the problems that your prospects and customers are telling you about? ⁓

Max Elster (19:05)

100%. I mean,

that's the interesting part of the talk track of the seller, but then also the underlying pain points that the customer is articulating. ⁓ So it's both. It's of course the customer's pain and the way they articulate their problems and relating it back to your value proposition. ⁓ I often say it's essentially two contexts cloud. It's the context cloud of what is your value proposition if you put it into very abstract words, right? Like what do you deliver and how do you make sure that's measurable?

And the other context cloud is the pains and the business priorities of your customer and essentially merging them together. And you're trying to align how do we, what's the, what's the similarity between everything that we do as an organization and the products and features that we've shipped and the outcomes that we deliver to the pain points that the customer has. you, you build a natural coherent mapping between both of them.

KK Anderson (19:53)

And does it also give information about, like in some kind of an LLM model, give information about the prospect or the company

Max Elster (20:00)

you bring up a good point. think a lot of companies, they start to tap deeper into account research, right? So when I'm a seller and I'm trying to prepare for my next meeting, I'm trying to get a better understanding of what is this customer even about, right? And how do they make decisions? What are their current priorities based on what I can find from just like online research? The problem with that oftentimes is that it's generic and it's not tied to the previous value that you've delivered for customers.

Right? Anybody can run a chat, you would see prompt and say, Hey, let me prepare for this podcasting interview. Right. But the people don't actually know what's what are the, the different podcasts that you've run in the past and how is my maybe unique value proposition in those types of environments. Or when I'm selling to somebody, how do I make sure that their specific challenges are tied to my individual value proposition that I can bring as an organization? And that's something where chat should be T unless it has a lot of context struggles to give you.

a performant high quality answer, right? It can always guide you in some direction, but it doesn't have all the context about the value intelligence there or the outcomes that you're delivering to customers because it doesn't access your product data and basically the outcomes that you're delivering across the board. So that's where we see systems like Chatjibiti and others and typical LLMs struggle. Doesn't necessarily mean that we don't use them as a technology or our customers don't use internal tools for their technology, right? I think LLMs are a great starting point, but you...

have to give them enough context and business context in order to really help you find the right path.

KK Anderson (21:22)

so I'm thinking about like if I were prospecting and I was in a prospecting motion, like having this single source of know value truth, right? How does that change the way I operate day to day? How does it differentiate me as a seller, as a prospector?

Max Elster (21:36)

I think very clearly, let's take an example. If I'm in an SDR at a software company selling to large FMCG companies, and I come in and say, we have built this platform with these individual features. And that's usually what individual users are reporting back to. this is what our platform does and the value it provides.

it can get very generic, right? And everybody has hundreds of those messages every single week in their inbox of something that is platform and feature pitching. How this is going to differ and differentiate you is that you're going to come in and you're going to say, hey, Kristen and Max, I work at this company. We have worked with three different FMCG companies in the past six months around these two core pain points. And after six months, these are the relatable ⁓

metrics that we have deployed, that we have basically mutually measured together with the customer, that we would love to see if that's also relevant to you. And if you are interested in solving similar pain points and you're interested in basically seeing similar outcomes for your organization. And it's less about the message itself, but it almost gives you more credibility as you're reaching out to these people and you're almost seen as somebody that actually understands their business, but also

can give relatable examples from other companies, not just on a qualitative, this is what our product does, but on a deeper level of these are the benchmarks that we have deployed for this customer and this is the outcome that potentially we could build for you as well. And let's mutually explore it before we jump into a conversation.

Mark Petruzzi (23:01)

So Max, what's the one thing CROs can start doing today to better capture the why we win?

Max Elster (23:09)

Yeah, think probably, how would a good consultant do it, right? I think usually it's like, let's do an assessment today and see already what you're doing today. So I would probably look at every single exit criteria in my sales process and just see what are we actually tracking? Are we tracking whether metrics and impact and the business case has been built before stage three, stage four? Is that something that's already happening today? Or is there...

almost like a free way for the seller to just continuously sell on features and function without actually getting any step in the sales process where you say, this is what we're going to do today, and this is kind of we make sure we measure that in the future.

I think it's a tactical step. So I think that's something that I would probably recommend to everybody just thinking about exit criteria and making sure that you can align your thinking and the outcomes you want to drive to your sales process. That's oftentimes a good starting point. It drives immediate quick wins. You can measure it. You can keep yourself and the teams accountable. And it's an easy way to get started.

Mark Petruzzi (24:05)

Excellent, excellent.

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 Steve Smith, Chief Revenue Officer at Live Oak Fiber, we go deeper into how his team is scaling with both agility and authenticity—blending AI, community engagement, and a customer-first mindset to win in a highly commoditized telecom market.

Steve unpacks what it really means to lead with transparency, build a culture that thrives across residential and B2B markets, and design a sales engine that delivers personalized value at scale. From t-shirt cannons to AI-assisted prospecting, it’s clear: growth happens when you meet your customers where they are—and actually understand who they are.

What You’ll Learn

• Competing Beyond the Product: Why the best way to differentiate is not what you sell—but how you serve.
• Human + AI Prospecting: Steve shares how Live Oak’s team blends digital ads, field outreach, and AI signals to achieve 80%+ MQL conversion.
• Leveraging Customer Context: How insights like home square footage and pool size help personalize campaigns—and why trust starts before the first call.
• Net Promoter as a North Star: The cultural and operational moves that helped Live Oak achieve a 76 NPS score—higher than Apple.
• Culture-Driven Growth: Why hiring “athletes,” not just resumes, is key to building high-performance sales teams in uncertain markets.
• AI Without the Hype: How Steve’s team uses AI practically—from outage alerts to upgrade prompts—without losing the human connection.

Key Topics

• GTM in both residential and business segments
• Creating “shock & awe” customer experiences
• Mapping Day 0 strategies with local event engagement
• Designing growth systems that work across sales channels
• Using CRM, digital behavior, and AI for smarter targeting
• Balancing automation with local, white-glove service
• Operationalizing culture in sales teams and hiring practices

Guest Spotlight: Steve Smith

Steve Smith is the Chief Revenue Officer at Live Oak Fiber, where he leads a people-first, tech-enabled go-to-market strategy across residential, MDU, and commercial segments. With more than 25 years of experience in telecom, Steve is known for his bold talent bets, operational creativity, and unwavering customer obsession.

Resources & Mentions

• Book: Good to Great by Jim Collins
• Book: Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
• Inspiration: The Savannah Bananas
• Sales Concept: “People don’t buy drill bits. They buy holes.”

🎧 Listen now and subscribe to Selling the Cloud wherever you get your podcasts.

Mark Petruzzi (00:31)

So Steve, we have a lot of audience members that are in the ISV market or SAS, Software as a Service. And really what you do is kind of telecom as a service, even though you guys were before all these acronyms like SAS. And it's interesting. We can all debate what a commoditized market really is.

Steve Smith (00:37)

Right?

Mark Petruzzi (00:52)

but some of them feel like their markets are moving into a commoditized market. So what advice would you give those CROs that trying to stand out as their market matures and does get more commoditized?

Steve Smith (01:07)

Well, will say it's a continual battle. there's no magic, there's no silver bullet, it's consistency, it's having the organization focus on it. But I would say don't compete on the product alone, compete on the experience. So focus on trust, transparency, and outcomes. If you do that, for instance, we have an outage, we post it online.

And we'll say we're having an outage, sorry for the inconvenience and call us here if you need assistance. And sometimes we'll have outages or issues in an area because we're still under construction and we'll proactively give people credits and say, hey, we're sorry. We're sorry this happened and we'll reach out. If you focus on those things, then you'll stop being more of a commodity and you'll be more indispensable, so to speak.

But people respond with that. It depends. it's a continual battle. In today's climate, everybody wants the best for the lowest price. if you focus on those things, trust, transparency, and outcomes. I have a friend that would say, people don't buy drill bits, they buy holes. So you talk about what they get out of it, not so much how you're doing it for them. Yes, we have fiber optic. Yes, it's in conduit, and it's buried, and we have

KK Anderson (02:04)

Mm-hmm.

Steve Smith (02:12)

phenomenal connectivity and nodes and we have all this telemetry around our network, but they don't care about that. I mean, they care about is it going to be up. Last year in September, Hurricane Helene was one of the late storms in the season and it went to, we have a lot of storms, but this one went across Glen County. 80 % of the county was without power. And however, if you had live Oak fiber,

Mark Petruzzi (02:27)

Yes.

Steve Smith (02:35)

and you had service, lot of people had generators, you were able to watch the Alabama-Georgia football game and there was watch parties online and people were like, I've got live oak fiber, you come to the house and we're watching the football game. That's what they care about. They do not care about that, yes, it took all that that I described to get that experience, but they care about the experience and what the outcome was. So yeah, we're excited about that.

Mark Petruzzi (02:43)

you

Yeah.

KK Anderson (02:56)

Wow, your

numbers must have flown after that.

Steve Smith (02:59)

Yes, we always get a bump on the weather for sure.

KK Anderson (03:03)

That's

awesome. Okay. so we've sort of touched on the first couple of topics, but like I'd like the most, lot of our audience are B2B CROs and CEO. we know 80 % of your businesses in the residential sector, but talk to us about how you're growing the business segment. And then also like same thing, how do you decommoditize a commodity in

with your business customers what's working.

Steve Smith (03:25)

Well, I mean, at a high level, we want every type of customer that we pass to be able to experience our service. So the most passings we have are residential. So that's the foundation of our company. And it builds that brand awareness and scale. It gives us cash. We can build into neighborhoods. There's a lot of houses. We have pretty, we have a good machine, I would say, in assembly line on how we connect those folks. But.

We balance that with business customers and multi-dwelling unit because that gives us density. Those are other kinds of customers on the network. The message, the philosophy, the ethos is the same. So it's not an either or. Like I mentioned, they complement each other. People ⁓ own a business, they also own a home and live there. And so there's that kind of crossover there. The motions are different on how you engage with them. We always

work with chambers and local stakeholders because that's a great way, especially in the communities we're in, that's a great way to stay ahead of the message. If there are issues that the community is experiencing or they have questions, these are the people, these are the leaders that are active in the community. And so we're engaged in those discussions. Our folks attend chamber meetings and they participate in those committees and that helps drive that. So it all works together, it all stacks, but it goes back to that basic principle of

I would say every door, every floor. Anyone on the network, we want them to be able to experience live-o-fiber.

KK Anderson (04:41)

love that every door, every floor. That's really cool. Okay. let's go into some sort of classic sales skills, if you will, and let's talk prospecting. that's an attempt at business development. And well, I guess across the three channels, residential business and your multi-family dwellings, what's working for you from a prospecting perspective?

Steve Smith (05:02)

Well, we have a recipe. I think we've nicknamed it shock and awe. And what we do is we have warm-up period. So we measure, we call day zero the ability to schedule a customer to install. And we work backwards and forwards from day zero. And we have an idea of how much time we need and what we need to do to warm up the market up until that day zero.

And we want people to be aware of our brand, be aware of our offerings. And so when the time comes, we've had a couple of interactions with them, and then we can schedule. So we work that channel. I would call those pre-registrations or pre-registered leads, marketing qualified leads, depending on who you are listening. And our sales teams actively nurture those. They nurture them through outbound phone calls. So we'll use digital to drive in some demand. We will use direct mail.

which is kind of like the percussion section of a band. You've to keep beating the direct mail drum. We'll use door hangers. We'll use a lot of stuff to generate this awareness over that timeframe, which is roughly, 60 to 90 days because people get excited about, you want them to get excited about having the service. And then from there, it turns into more of a, active conversion campaign. We convert about 80 to 85 % of those marketing qualified leads.

The ones we don't convert typically have moved or they fall out. That's a pretty high ratio and we do that through these nurture programs. But how we prospect is very simple. Our business is address driven. So direct mail is one thing we do. We have a very great, great's not even the right word for it. Thomas Allen runs our marketing. We have a highly customer focused digital program.

and we're running different kinds of digital ads as we get closer to day zero. And that helps as well. Anyone that interacts on our website, we capture bits and pieces of information. Maybe we only get your address. Maybe we get a phone number or an email. And all of those get collected. I'm a huge fan of that show, Gold Rush, when it first came out. If you've ever watched that show, everybody builds their gold machine differently. But essentially what they do is they turn through yards and yards of dirt.

And they put it in those machine and it knocks out the big rocks and at the very end like it goes through all these different methodologies to get to the the pay dirt which is the dark dirt and the gold and it's like two guys and they're literally hand panning it out, you know in a tent. That's really what it is for us too. And you've got to go through that you got to go through and constantly fix that machine. Sometimes we do buy cold leads and at the residential level that's tough with Do Not Call.

regulations in place. The other thing, we do a lot of events, we do a lot of localized events. We have a great local campaign on that. people come in. A lot of times now at this point, they're customers. We have customers show up and then we have future customers show up. So we get all that interaction. But anyway, we can kind of drive that consumer, but we start with the consumers because they have the most events around that.

KK Anderson (07:25)

Mm-hmm.

Steve Smith (07:45)

And then it just drives it into that machine that I talked about. And we just try to nurture them to that day zero and then we convert them. So today that's what we do. There might be some different things that we have to do going forward. It's continuous improvement. So I have to say this because it is funny, but when I worked at a company in Arkansas and we would go to a lot of events and you give out t-shirts.

KK Anderson (07:55)

Yeah.

Steve Smith (08:05)

And if you ever give it out t-shirts, people will show up to your booth and they'll say, I need two mediums and a large. And then the large isn't big enough, so they need the XL. it's not a very effective way to give out t-shirts. So one of our folks that worked there, her husband built things. And I mean like built things. And he said, I can build a t-shirt cannon. And I said, can you build it? So I gave him the specs off Amazon and I said, can you build one like this? And he built his t-shirt cannon.

Mark Petruzzi (08:14)

Thanks

Steve Smith (08:29)

Now, the difference was when we would go out with the t-shirt cannon, it didn't matter what size the t-shirt was. If we shot it out of the cannon, then people would knock each other over to get to the t-shirt. So I was like, we're going to need that at Live Oak. So in the original business plan, we had these really nice t-shirt cannons and we still have them. We have a blue one and we have a red one. Blue one stays in Florida, the red one's in Georgia for the Bulldogs. And yeah, we shoot them off.

I may or may not have shot one off in the office in the last couple months and shot a hole in the ceiling tile. So it works. It'll put a t-shirt on a rope at 100 yards, but it's just fun. So those are different ways that we kind of, know, people like that and it's fun. So that's some of the stuff we do.

KK Anderson (08:56)

you

Mark Petruzzi (09:08)

So Steve, have you shot at people that have not made their quota? Is that kind of how it works?

Steve Smith (09:13)

⁓ well, no, we haven't done that yet, But I have shot at new salespeople, testing, the trajectory in the parking lot. We have we have done that. And I think it's probably on video somewhere. Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (09:16)

but

well, you see if their reflexes are quick enough to catch it. That's the, that's All right, well, let's go to topic four. This has been really, really enjoyable and let's keep it going. So I think we titled that leveraging AI and community engagement for growth. But I think I'd like to title it leveraging, technology and kind of anti-tech, before tech.

Steve Smith (09:28)

Yes, that's exactly right. Exactly right.

Sure.

You got it.

Mark Petruzzi (09:50)

because you're using a bit of old school here combined with all the power of GenAI. So what I love about your team does, and frankly even easier in the B2B space than it is in the B2C space, but your residential team uses a lot of creative local insights. They're analyzing Zillow all the time. It's all about maps.

You mentioned about the home square footage and figuring out what that is. I even read somewhere you're looking at clients pool size to tailor particular offers. How does that improve conversations and how does that improve your Salesforce effectiveness as well?

Steve Smith (10:21)

Yeah.

Well, I mean, it makes the conversation personal and not generic. We're not doing it to be, sneaky or anything. We're just trying to understand the customer. We've done our homework. So if we're calling someone, if someone's got a pool or, you know, a large backyard area, probably might have some, they might be spending some time outside. They might be inclined for like an outdoor wifi solution as an example. It just builds trust out of the gate that you know that

you're asking them about their, you've got their address, so that's public information. You're just trying to have a better conversation. We've all been in those sales situations where the pitch is completely off and you're like, you didn't do your homework. I want my teams do their homework. So they try to have a very, as much as possible, an intelligent conversation, a casual, informative conversation. we're not just.

banging through numbers to get to yes. We're having real conversations with people. So there's tools that have that. And then there are some AI tools. We do a lot of work around buyer personas in different areas. we look at words or messages that might ring true with some of those folks. For instance, in a lot of our markets, we have a real heavy DIY DNA.

and a lot of people like to do so. we focus a lot of things around that. Messaging around, creating a gaming room or with our app you can basically kind of customize your home network. You can have a network for the kids to stream, one for kids to game, and then one for mom or dad to do online work or online school. kind of little different things like that. We're using technology. We do...

AI is, I hear a lot about AI replacing people and maybe it will for certain jobs, but the way we use it a lot and we have kind of the standard kit that comes with your Microsoft license and then some folks will use different versions, Claude or ChatGPT. And I would say that it's an enhancement to the experience. It's never gonna replace the authenticity of a human and not yet. Well.

You said season at the beginning. I definitely feel old when you say that. mean, it's old. maybe not as long as I have a say in it, because I think there's a personalization part that you can't get yet. But you could definitely get far ahead in terms of understanding your customer and their needs with these different tools. And some are free. So why not use them? It was our sales manager, Katie Robeson, who

KK Anderson (12:22)

What are you doing?

Mm-hmm.

Steve Smith (12:41)

She came from Louis Vuitton. She was the one that came to me with this like hey, we're doing this and I was like, that's fantastic I didn't even it wasn't my idea. I just encouraged it. So yeah

KK Anderson (12:51)

I keep thinking as you're talking about all of this data that you have, there's so many ways you can use AI to really leverage that data to be even more customer obsessed and meet their needs even more directly based on different data triggers. Have you guys looked into doing that yet?

Steve Smith (13:07)

We have a little bit of that. We have some of that on our digital side. So we adjust our ads based on weather and that's what that's automated. then we also have, but in terms of like kind of a CRM and loading that we're in the continual phases of making that work. Like where does that information reside? We look a lot at our customer experiences. We have systems that kind of things that happen to users. We know when people probably need an upgrade.

and we proactively will text them and they're having, maybe they're hitting bandwidth limits.

KK Anderson (13:36)

And how do

know that? Because you're hitting bandwidth.

Steve Smith (13:38)

Yeah, we can see the user behavior. how much they're using, how many times they're kind of hitting peak, when they're hitting peak. Every ISP can pull this data, but we have a tool, a platform that we use through our CPE provider that allows us to get that visibility. So then we just action on it. So that's in play now. So the next step is kind of how you described is the more information we can.

gather about our customer and their experience, can store it. It's not just the storing it, it's being able to action off it. Is it insightful enough or are we having to boil the ocean to get some answer?

KK Anderson (14:11)

with agentic AI, you'll be able to piece agents together to make workflows to just, it could really be incredible. Yeah.

Steve Smith (14:13)

Yep.

It is. I've

it work too on the fiber design side. So there are softwares where we're designing networks and you can input all these different data sets, like where's the utilities, where's the streets, where's the public right away, and it will, generate a design, which might take a drafter, seven to 10 hours to do, and it can be done in 30 seconds or less. So there's tools like that that are helpful. Not that the designer isn't good, but where computers can crunch things.

looking for correlations and data and things like that. That's super helpful. So we're thinking about it and we're startups, so we're still, you know, the old analogy, we're definitely flying the plane and enhancing it at the same time. yeah. Part of the fun, thank you.

Mark Petruzzi (14:53)

Aren't we all Steve, right? Great, all right, let's jump to our rapid fire questions that our audience loves so much. And I'm really excited to see your perspectives on this. What was your first product or service you ever sold?

Steve Smith (14:54)

Yes, that's right.

Okay.

Okay.

I would say I was a paperboy for the Denver Post. I'm definitely dating myself. People literally bought subscriptions to the newspaper and the Sunday one was easy to sell because it had comics and it had the really cool sports section and of course it had the coupons. And as the paperboy though, you had to put all that stuff together in your garage. You got the Sunday paper delivered and you had to put it together.

Mark Petruzzi (15:32)

seven times heavier, maybe 10 times heavier.

Steve Smith (15:34)

⁓

yeah, was, gone are the days you couldn't deliver it from a bike and just wing it. I mean, I couldn't. I didn't have the arm strength. We did it out of the back of a country Squire station wagon. And it was, you my dad would drive and my brother and I would, you know, chuck the papers two hands because the Sunday paper Denver Post back in those days was something to behold. But the upsell was the daily. So if you could get them to take the daily, then,

that was the tough part. you try to say, oh, you know, again, this is pre-internet. So you're going to get the news every day. You're going to find out what the Broncos are or aren't doing in the off season or during the regular season. I think that was my pitch. So yeah.

KK Anderson (16:10)

I love it.

Even then you were thinking about customer outcomes. favorite CRO or CEO to follow.

Steve Smith (16:14)

I was. Yes. Yes.

I touched on him earlier, Jesse Cole of the Savannah Bananas. I follow that He's on LinkedIn. He has great content. He talks about the books he's read. He's fantastic. And it's enjoyable to watch. Yes.

KK Anderson (16:25)

That's right.

Can't wait for him to hear this one. And Jesse,

if you're listening, we want you to come on selling the cloud as well.

Mark Petruzzi (16:35)

Yeah.

Steve Smith (16:38)

You should come on Selling Cloud,

Mark Petruzzi (16:39)

There

Steve Smith (16:40)

Jesse. Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (16:40)

you go. Okay, so a leadership or go-to-market practice that you believe every sales and marketing leader should adopt and you've shared a few great ones already. Is there one of those or another one that just goes to the top?

Steve Smith (16:55)

I'd say, I said it before, hire athletes. So hire people that can collaborate and thrive in adapting to change. You do this, you can fill a lot of roles early on. Even if you're an older legacy industry, you're gonna get really fresh perspectives if you hire people like this, because they can transfer their learning. So when I say athletes, I mean like a business athlete. Someone that's really good at, can be good at multiple positions within your company. Those are the people to get.

KK Anderson (17:20)

Love it. My favorite advice you would give your 21 year old self. Which was just yesterday. That was just yesterday, right?

Steve Smith (17:24)

there's a lot. yeah, it

was absolutely just yesterday. would, it's definitely not yesterday. I would tell my 21 year old self to bet on people sooner. Skills matter, but character and curiosity and grit, that's where you're gonna get the most out of life. Don't be afraid to take those big swings.

You mentioned it, Mark, you're betting on people, you bet on people you trust and share your values. And that's where the wins come from. So I've always bet on people, but I would bet on people more sooner if I could go back in time.

Mark Petruzzi (17:58)

So I have a typical question that we ask every week that I'm gonna change a little bit to you. The question is, what is your favorite sales or marketing book? But then I wanna add on, when are you writing your book?

Steve Smith (18:10)

⁓ well not gonna write a book, I'm gonna write a movie. So that's my... Yeah, I don't know if it'll get made, but it'll... I have a lot of business...

Mark Petruzzi (18:12)

Even better. You make a lot more money with the movie, selling a movie script than you would with any book nowadays.

KK Anderson (18:21)

Hey, you need to talk

to Mark. He's got a lot of movie experience actually.

Steve Smith (18:25)

Hey, we should do it. even have actors picked out for various characters. So we'll see. Hopefully I want it to be PG-13, but I'm worried it's going to be TVMA. Favorite business book is, I like a lot of them. I like Blink by Malcolm Gladwell because it talks about paralysis through analysis, trusting your instincts, which is hard. what I liked about the book was

Mark Petruzzi (18:29)

I love it.

KK Anderson (18:41)

and

Steve Smith (18:46)

People have natural, your human brain, AI is awesome, but the human brain can do so many things so fast that you don't even know that it's doing it and it picks up on all the subconscious behavior. Like I'm sure if the computer analyzed my facial expressions during this podcast, it would give you feedback on me. anyway, but it does this and people that can harness that, and it's hard, but that feeling you get like, have a good feeling about this or that, like why is that? And.

KK Anderson (18:53)

Mm-hmm.

Steve Smith (19:11)

learning to harness that, it's great. And it's an easy read. He's got great perspective. It just kind of flows. So I would recommend that one. It's my favorite.

KK Anderson (19:19)

Okay Steve, well thank you so much. Tell us where people can find you.

Steve Smith (19:22)

Well, you can find me on live Oak fiber.com. If you go there, you can follow us and we're on LinkedIn. We're on the gram. We're on the Instagram. We're on the X or Twitter or whatever they're calling it these days and Facebook and LinkedIn. So yeah, you can find us at live Oak fiber.com. if you're, if you're, yeah, if you're in Florida, if you're in the panhandle between Pensacola and Panama city beach, or if you're over there in Georgia,

KK Anderson (19:36)

And if you're in Florida or Georgia, then they can switch to you.

Steve Smith (19:48)

outside of Savannah, Tybee Island, or if you're down in Glen County, St. Simons Island, Sea Island, Brunswick, you can find us. You'll see our trucks everywhere. So yeah, follow us. Even if you're not living in those areas, you should follow us. We have great content. We run our own podcast. have a kid named, he's not a kid, well, he is a kid, Garrett O'Leary. That's the one that came, Garrett came, used to do social media for a soccer team in California, but Garrett runs our podcast and it's called The Fiber.

and we have great local people on all the time. have some industry folks, so you guys should get on it one day. We'll have you on. Yeah, follow us there and watch our journey and cheer us on or throw tomatoes. ⁓ You can. There's a check availability button and just put your address.

KK Anderson (20:20)

would love to.

Mark Petruzzi (20:21)

We'd love to as well.

KK Anderson (20:25)

Well, please come to Texas. I'm ready to switch right now.

Mark Petruzzi (20:31)

Yeah,

that's the only problem with that. We can't get you in our markets for sure. We'd love to. Yeah, we'll get there. All right, Steve, well, thank you again. This was really informative, really enjoyable. And thanks to our wonderful audience out there for joining us each week and enjoy that we're right before it. Well, this is gonna be coming out after.

KK Anderson (20:33)

Okay, done.

Steve Smith (20:38)

we're not there yet.

Mark Petruzzi (20:54)

after the Labor Day weekend, but I know we're all working pretty late here before the Labor Day weekend. So thanks again for doing that with us, Steve.

Steve Smith (21:02)

We

Yeah, thanks for having me on to both of you and we should talk again.

Mark Petruzzi (21:07)

Sounds like a plan. Cheers.

Steve Smith (21:09)

All right,

thanks y'all.

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

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

What You’ll Learn

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

Key Topics

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

Guest Spotlight: Steve Smith

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

Resources & Mentions

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (00:31)

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

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

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

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

Steve Smith (02:07)

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

Mark Petruzzi (02:09)

Excellent.

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

Steve Smith (02:19)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (02:38)

And why was that decision so important?

Steve Smith (02:42)

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (04:22)

Yeah, and

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

Steve Smith (04:35)

Okay.

Mark Petruzzi (04:44)

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

Steve Smith (04:49)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (05:09)

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

Steve Smith (05:27)

Well,

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (06:05)

I love it.

Steve Smith (06:14)

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (07:03)

No way.

Steve Smith (07:03)

of course, but that

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

Mark Petruzzi (07:16)

haha

KK Anderson (07:18)

Wow.

Well, and.

Steve Smith (07:28)

It happens.

KK Anderson (07:29)

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

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

Steve Smith (08:03)

Ahem.

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

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

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

KK Anderson (09:25)

I still don't understand that.

Steve Smith (09:28)

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

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

KK Anderson (09:58)

Mm-hmm.

Steve Smith (10:12)

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

KK Anderson (10:30)

That's gotta be the best feeling.

Steve Smith (10:36)

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

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

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

KK Anderson (11:42)

I love that.

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

Steve Smith (11:51)

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (12:36)

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

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

Steve Smith (13:00)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (13:23)

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

Steve Smith (13:33)

It is.

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

Mark Petruzzi (13:51)

Hmm.

Steve Smith (14:05)

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

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (14:57)

Wow.

Steve Smith (15:20)

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

Mark Petruzzi (15:26)

Yeah.

He did it.

Steve Smith (15:45)

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

Mark Petruzzi (16:02)

Maybe you should

sign them up as your corporate sponsorship.

Steve Smith (16:08)

We're in discussions. a sponsor yet.

Mark Petruzzi (16:10)

There you go.

KK Anderson (16:11)

that's

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

Steve Smith (16:22)

Yes.

Right.

outstanding.

KK Anderson (16:33)

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

Steve Smith (16:36)

Right, right. Yeah, they get great,

great connections.

KK Anderson (16:41)

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

Steve Smith (16:53)

their love.

We measured quarterly

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

Mark Petruzzi (17:23)

Wow.

Wow.

Steve Smith (17:24)

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

KK Anderson (17:41)

Congratulations.

Steve Smith (17:46)

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

KK Anderson (17:58)

By how many?

Wow!

Steve Smith (18:11)

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

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

KK Anderson (18:44)

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

Steve Smith (18:50)

We're

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (19:27)

Cool.

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

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

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

What You’ll Learn:

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

Key Topics:

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

Guest Spotlight: Jamie Wilkinson

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

Resources & Mentions:

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (00:31)

KK, can you take us into topic three?

KK Anderson (00:33)

Yeah,

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

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

Jamie (01:13)

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

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

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (02:40)

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

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

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

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

Jamie (04:10)

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (06:31)

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

KK Anderson (06:32)

There's a, there's a.

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

Jamie (07:06)

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

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

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

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

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

KK Anderson (09:02)

Imagine

Mark Petruzzi (09:02)

Jamie, I love that.

KK Anderson (09:03)

what we will be able to do.

Jamie (09:06)

I mean like, you're just stupid.

Mark Petruzzi (09:09)

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

Jamie (09:23)

Yeah.

Mark Petruzzi (09:36)

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

KK Anderson (10:02)

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

Jamie (10:13)

God.

KK Anderson (10:30)

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

Jamie (10:42)

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

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

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

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

KK Anderson (12:10)

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

Mark Petruzzi (12:11)

Very interesting.

Jamie (12:18)

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

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (13:38)

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

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

Jamie (14:32)

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

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

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

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

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

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

KK Anderson (16:47)

I'm sorry.

Mark Petruzzi (16:47)

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

Jamie (16:54)

massively.

Mark Petruzzi (17:15)

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

Jamie (17:17)

Thanks, Mark.

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

Mark Petruzzi (17:45)

Well, tell us

KK Anderson (17:46)

First lane.

Mark Petruzzi (17:46)

first,

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

Jamie (17:50)

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

so my first...

KK Anderson (18:01)

First, revenue critical hire.

Jamie (18:03)

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

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

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

KK Anderson (19:02)

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

Mark Petruzzi (19:03)

Excellent.

Jamie (19:13)

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

Mark Petruzzi (19:16)

Yeah.

Jamie (19:16)

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

Mark Petruzzi (19:39)

Yeah, yep,

very cool. Yeah.

Jamie (19:41)

Which was such a cool thing,

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

Mark Petruzzi (19:51)

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

Jamie (19:56)

Yeah, well he completely, he

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

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

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

What You’ll Learn:

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

Key Topics:

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

Guest Spotlight: Jamie Wilkinson

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (00:00)

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

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

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

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

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

Jamie (01:58)

No problem. My pleasure.

Mark Petruzzi (02:01)

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

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

Jamie (02:33)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KK Anderson (04:50)

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

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

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

Jamie (06:03)

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (07:43)

that's great.

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

Jamie (08:05)

supposed friends.

Mark Petruzzi (08:06)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jamie (10:15)

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

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

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

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

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

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

KK Anderson (12:17)

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

Jamie (12:25)

for sure.

KK Anderson (12:37)

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

Jamie (12:58)

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

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

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (14:12)

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

Jamie (14:18)

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

Mark Petruzzi (14:23)

Yeah.

Jamie (14:32)

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

Mark Petruzzi (14:47)

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

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

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

Jamie (15:48)

I just,

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (16:14)

Yeah, incredible. All

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

KK Anderson (16:26)

Sure.

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

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

Jamie (16:55)

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

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

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

KK Anderson (17:51)

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

Jamie (17:58)

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (18:25)

Well, the beauty,

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

Jamie (18:30)

everything.

radio, TV,

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

Mark Petruzzi (18:44)

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

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

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

Jamie (19:38)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What You’ll Learn:

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

Key Topics:

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

Guest Spotlight: Stephen Messer

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

Resources & Mentions:

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (00:00)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What You’ll Learn:

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

Key Topics:

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

Guest Spotlight: Josh Payne

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

Resources & Mentions:

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (00:02)

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

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

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

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

Josh (01:31)

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

Mark Petruzzi (01:33)

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

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

Josh (02:15)

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

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

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

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

KK Anderson (03:51)

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

Josh (03:59)

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (06:20)

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

Josh (06:35)

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

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

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

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

KK Anderson (08:17)

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

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

Josh (08:53)

Yeah, so

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

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

⁓ of your business value.

Mark Petruzzi (09:56)

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

Josh (10:05)

Yes, exactly.

Mark Petruzzi (10:26)

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

Josh (10:32)

Yeah, A to Z testing.

KK Anderson (10:35)

Yeah.

Josh (10:46)

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

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

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

KK Anderson (11:54)

The superhuman?

Josh (12:11)

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

KK Anderson (12:34)

humans.

Josh (12:40)

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

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

KK Anderson (13:16)

and that compounds over time. Yeah.

Josh (13:19)

yeah, that's the beauty

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

KK Anderson (13:25)

Mm-hmm.

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

Josh (13:58)

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

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

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

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

KK Anderson (15:38)

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

Mark Petruzzi (15:39)

That sucks.

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

Josh (15:44)

I

Yeah, let's jump in.

Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (18:15)

Mm.

Josh (18:30)

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

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

KK Anderson (19:10)

That's really cool.

Mark Petruzzi (19:12)

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

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

Josh (19:53)

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

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

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

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

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

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

KK Anderson (22:39)

Yeah.

Josh (22:45)

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

Mark Petruzzi (22:54)

All right.

Josh (23:14)

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

KK Anderson (23:27)

That is really cool. Go ahead Mark.

Mark Petruzzi (23:31)

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

KK Anderson (23:32)

So.

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

Josh (24:02)

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (26:09)

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

Josh (26:25)

Mm-hmm.

Mark Petruzzi (26:39)

mean, that's the key right there.

Josh (26:42)

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

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

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

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

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

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

KK Anderson (29:26)

So.

Mark Petruzzi (29:26)

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

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

KK Anderson (29:47)

Yeah.

Josh (29:52)

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

Mark Petruzzi (30:09)

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

Josh (30:16)

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

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

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (31:49)

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

KK Anderson (31:50)

Absolutely.

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

AI agents into their existing marketing stack.

Josh (32:21)

that's a fantastic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (36:48)

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

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

Josh (37:42)

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

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (38:46)

Yeah.

Josh (39:10)

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

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

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

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

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

KK Anderson (41:14)

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

Josh (41:27)

Yeah, so it's a great question.

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

KK Anderson (41:46)

Okay.

Josh (41:53)

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

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

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

KK Anderson (43:00)

Yeah.

Josh (43:20)

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

Mark Petruzzi (43:28)

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

KK Anderson (43:42)

Hahaha! ⁓

Josh (43:43)

already happening. wow. That's amazing.

Mark Petruzzi (43:57)

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

Josh (44:05)

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

KK Anderson (44:14)

That's right.

Mark Petruzzi (44:28)

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

Josh (44:31)

Definitely not, but

I appreciate that.

KK Anderson (44:37)

Okay,

who's your favorite CEO to follow?

Josh (44:41)

man,

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

Mark Petruzzi (45:02)

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

Josh (45:11)

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

KK Anderson (45:39)

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

Josh (45:42)

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

KK Anderson (45:49)

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

Josh (45:55)

that's a good

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (46:45)

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

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

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

Josh (47:54)

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

KK Anderson (47:54)

Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you, Josh.

Mark Petruzzi (48:01)

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

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

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

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

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

What You’ll Learn:

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

Key Topics:

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

Guest Spotlight: Josh Payne

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

Resources & Mentions:

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (00:02)

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

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

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

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

Josh (01:31)

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

Mark Petruzzi (01:33)

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

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

Josh (02:15)

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

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

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

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

KK Anderson (03:51)

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

Josh (03:59)

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (06:20)

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

Josh (06:35)

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

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

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

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

KK Anderson (08:17)

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

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

Josh (08:53)

Yeah, so

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

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

⁓ of your business value.

Mark Petruzzi (09:56)

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

Josh (10:05)

Yes, exactly.

Mark Petruzzi (10:26)

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

Josh (10:32)

Yeah, A to Z testing.

KK Anderson (10:35)

Yeah.

Josh (10:46)

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

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

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

KK Anderson (11:54)

The superhuman?

Josh (12:11)

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

KK Anderson (12:34)

humans.

Josh (12:40)

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

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

KK Anderson (13:16)

and that compounds over time. Yeah.

Josh (13:19)

yeah, that's the beauty

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

KK Anderson (13:25)

Mm-hmm.

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

Josh (13:58)

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

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

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

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

KK Anderson (15:38)

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

Mark Petruzzi (15:39)

That sucks.

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

Josh (15:44)

I

Yeah, let's jump in.

Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (18:15)

Mm.

Josh (18:30)

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

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

KK Anderson (19:10)

That's really cool.

Mark Petruzzi (19:12)

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

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

Josh (19:53)

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

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

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

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

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

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

KK Anderson (22:39)

Yeah.

Josh (22:45)

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

Mark Petruzzi (22:54)

All right.

Josh (23:14)

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

KK Anderson (23:27)

That is really cool. Go ahead Mark.

Mark Petruzzi (23:31)

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

KK Anderson (23:32)

So.

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

Josh (24:02)

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (26:09)

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

Josh (26:25)

Mm-hmm.

Mark Petruzzi (26:39)

mean, that's the key right there.

Josh (26:42)

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

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

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

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

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

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

KK Anderson (29:26)

So.

Mark Petruzzi (29:26)

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

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

KK Anderson (29:47)

Yeah.

Josh (29:52)

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

Mark Petruzzi (30:09)

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

Josh (30:16)

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

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

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (31:49)

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

KK Anderson (31:50)

Absolutely.

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

AI agents into their existing marketing stack.

Josh (32:21)

that's a fantastic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (36:48)

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

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

Josh (37:42)

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

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (38:46)

Yeah.

Josh (39:10)

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

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

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

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

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

KK Anderson (41:14)

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

Josh (41:27)

Yeah, so it's a great question.

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

KK Anderson (41:46)

Okay.

Josh (41:53)

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

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

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

KK Anderson (43:00)

Yeah.

Josh (43:20)

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

Mark Petruzzi (43:28)

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

KK Anderson (43:42)

Hahaha! ⁓

Josh (43:43)

already happening. wow. That's amazing.

Mark Petruzzi (43:57)

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

Josh (44:05)

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

KK Anderson (44:14)

That's right.

Mark Petruzzi (44:28)

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

Josh (44:31)

Definitely not, but

I appreciate that.

KK Anderson (44:37)

Okay,

who's your favorite CEO to follow?

Josh (44:41)

man,

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

Mark Petruzzi (45:02)

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

Josh (45:11)

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

KK Anderson (45:39)

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

Josh (45:42)

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

KK Anderson (45:49)

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

Josh (45:55)

that's a good

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

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

Mark Petruzzi (46:45)

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

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

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

Josh (47:54)

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

KK Anderson (47:54)

Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you, Josh.

Mark Petruzzi (48:01)

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

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