Bridging the GTM Gap with Revenue Reimagined Founders

Speaker 1 00:00:02  Welcome to the Growth Elevated Leadership podcast with Julian Castelli. Each week, we talk with senior tech leaders to explore stories and insights about the challenges involved with growing technology companies. We hope that these stories can help you become a better leader and help you navigate your own growth journey.

Speaker 2 00:00:26  Hi, this is Julian Castelli. I’m the host of the Growth Elevated Leadership podcast, where each week I talk to inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders in the tech industry. Past guests have included CEOs and CXOs of great companies like Work Front, CG healthcare, Radical Systems, Enrollment Retail, me Not, the San Francisco 40 Niners, and many more. This episode is brought brought to you by growth. Elevated growth elevated as a community of tech founders, CEOs, and CXOs who are committed to working together to share best practices and learnings in an effort to help all of us become better leaders. We do this through educational programs like this podcast as well as our blog and of course, our annual tech summit in beautiful Park City, Utah. If you enjoy skiing and networking with other tech executives, check us out at Growth elevated.com.

Speaker 2 00:01:17  Today, I am super excited to introduce to you guys the founders of Revenue Reimagined, Revenue Reimagined as a sales and go to market expert agency that works with tech companies and other growth companies to create predictable revenue. These guys got on my radar screen because they’re out there talking about the go to market gap, and I’m seeing that everywhere. It used to be much easier to to be successful with sales with low interest rates. And when everyone was booming and people were were buying everything in sight. But it’s a lot hard lately. And these guys have a framework. They’re calling it the go to market gap, and they actually have the confidence to come in and help you fix it. They’re doing the hard work of unpacking the mess and rebuilding foundations to help companies get their revenue back on track. some might say they are reimagining how to restart revenue growth. Dale Zwizinski is the co-founder of Revenue Reimagined, and he previously ran sales departments at X44 and Halo. Jake Reni, also a co-founder, previously ran sales at tiled and has a senior sales leadership roles at Adobe.

Speaker 2 00:02:22  Finally, Adam Jay. The co-founder and previously ran sales at Falcon and Reprise. So these guys have great experience and I’m excited to bring them on to talk about this, this go to market gap. Welcome, Jake, Dale and Adam.

Speaker 3 00:02:40  Thanks for having us. I like how you did the the the the cycle. We put Adam last. So that’s always good. Listen, I I’m good to be last. I have to do less baby. That’s it. I gotta fix I gotta fix everything that these guys do. I’m kidding. That is true. That’s true.

Speaker 2 00:02:57  Excellent. Well, guys. Hey, thanks for being here today. you know, as we’ve talked and we prepared for this episode, we’ve talked about just how hard it is today, to to grow sales. Am I imagining that or is that, is that, a reality out there? It’s a lot harder the last 12, 18 months that it.

Speaker 3 00:03:16  Not night and day. It’s what what worked six, 12, 18 months ago doesn’t work anymore.

Speaker 3 00:03:22  go to market changes. I would even say in Jake and Dale gut check me. But even what worked 30 days ago doesn’t work anymore. It’s changing so rapidly, and it’s such a fast pace. Yeah, yeah, I go ahead.

Speaker 2 00:03:35  Dale.

Speaker 4 00:03:36  Yeah, I’m. We’re seeing that all the time. I think where people would build ideal customer profiles and value propositions like those need to be reviewed constantly and all the time. So, that’s something happening currently all the time and no one’s doing it.

Speaker 2 00:03:53  Yeah, I think I think we’re in a state where a lot of people are looking what at what has worked in the past. It’s not working. And there’s there’s some panic setting in. And, I think that’s what makes Mike special about you guys. This is a relatively new company. I want you guys to tell the founding story, but the fact that you are like the firemen coming to put out the fire, you know, I’m sure. Sure, it means you’re quite busy out there. And I’m grateful for your time this morning.

Speaker 2 00:04:15  tell us a little bit about your background. So you guys are are revenue experts. You’ve all had different experiences. Let’s just go around the horn, and I’d like to at, you know, have you tell us, you know, what experiences that you bring to the table that make your revenue expert? And why did you want to start helping companies on a on a fractional advisory basis versus, you know, what you’ve done in the past? Let’s let’s start with Jake.

Speaker 5 00:04:39  Yeah, that’s a good question. I, I had been thinking about it for, for some years. And, what I found as I was going through the later stage or I guess later stage of my career with some of the startups I had been a part of, is consistently the challenges that they were going through, of moving out of these product market fit phases into the like, the possibility of scale. And it just started noticing a pattern of the consistent issues that they were coming across every single time, that we were, you know, finding ourselves with the challenge of getting foundational issues just like settled, of how to get the right processes in place, how to get the right, spend and do this responsibly, and and how to prevent or avoid some of the inevitable things that seem to be coming up often, which is like layoffs when we over hired or we overspend.

Speaker 5 00:05:33  And so, for me, it got to a point where I realized, okay, I could either do this inside a single business and keep banging my head up against the wall, or I can take a lot of the frameworks that I’ve I’ve developed over time, the playbooks I’ve developed over time and really help do this at scale. And and that to me was something super exciting. And that’s why I decided to go out on my own. Finally, after about a year ago, after my buddy Dale here had been pushing me for the last two years to go maybe two and a half years to go out on my own. So that’s that’s why I decided to go do this.

Speaker 2 00:06:08  I like that the pattern recognition. Right. You know, once you see it a few times, you’re like, man, this is really helpful for a lot of people, right?

Speaker 5 00:06:15  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Speaker 2 00:06:17  I mean, that’s one of the reasons we started this podcast in our blog, because we’re all seeing the same challenges over and over again, you know, different companies serving different customer needs, but with, you know, the same functional challenges happen over and over again.

Speaker 2 00:06:30  That’s that’s what we’re trying to do at growth elevators help people accelerate through those because it’s such a, it’s such a, rewarding feeling when you can help people skip steps or accelerate based on, you know, I always say, you know, learn from my mistakes. Please. I’ve got plenty to share. Adam, tell me about your journey, please.

Speaker 3 00:06:48  So it’s funny, Dale also is the one who made me go out on my own but a little different of a story. I started my career working for large public companies in health care, and got a ton of solid experience on systems, process tools, and, red tape at the same time. and realized that I didn’t love that big giant world. I didn’t feel like I made as much of an impact as I could. So I went over to the startup side, and was very blessed to be part of a couple IPOs and then wanted to get earlier in startups. so got into, like some seed and series A companies and very similar to what Jake said.

Speaker 3 00:07:27  Started seeing the same thing over and over and over again as a first time VP of sales or CRO, or second time VP of sales, CRO coming into the org to, you know, fix what the first one had been broken. I got pitched like I was an investor, right? Everything’s perfect, everything’s great. There’s just a couple things we need to change. But we’re going to change the world here. And all we need is for you to fix it. in being earlier in my career in naive, like I didn’t know what questions to ask, what metrics to dig into, what to really insist of. Like I need to see these reports. I need to see these numbers, not just take your word for it. And it took it. And were they even.

Speaker 2 00:08:07  There when you ask those questions, typically.

Speaker 5 00:08:09  No.

Speaker 3 00:08:10  No. there was a company that shall remain nameless where after being there a month, like I was told, we had X number of customers while we did, but half of them weren’t paying and had churns.

Speaker 3 00:08:22  And we’re still counting them as customers and we’re still counting the revenue they should have been bringing in as revenue. Oh, coupled with the fact that we were selling vaporware, another story for another time. but what I realized, Julian, is it’s not unique, right? It’s the same story every time. And oftentimes it’s because founders have been given horrific advice in the past, whether that be by, you know, a VC, whether that be by a inexperienced VP of sales who had no business being that first sales leader, because building is very different than scaling. And I realized that if I want to have that impact, that I want, I need to get to these folks earlier in the game, and I need to be able to help more than, you know, one at a time. After that last role, Dale had encouraged me, to go out on my own, which I was very reluctant to do. I did based on his pushing. And I’ll let Dale finish the story of how we wound up together.

Speaker 3 00:09:20  but here we are, in hindsight, being 2020, man. Like, there’s a lot of things I look back in life and I’m like, oh, I would have changed this. I would have changed that. I this is probably one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I can’t imagine doing anything different or with anyone different than these guys.

Speaker 2 00:09:35  That’s awesome. Well, Dale, sounds like you were the instigator. You’re pulling these guys out of their roles. Well, you’re you’re the house breaker.

Speaker 4 00:09:41  I’m. I’m a little bit of the instigator. yeah, I’ve I’ve done sales for longer than I want to admit. and I was doing a lot of startup companies, so I’ve done, I don’t know, I quit counting now I say 25. It could be even more, but I’ve done it in like seven different countries. And so I did a lot internationally. I went into Oracle for a little while to get some like process execution type stuff done. so I did that for a little while.

Speaker 4 00:10:08  sold the company, to another fairly large mid-sized company called Fair Isaac. but always had the heart for the startup company because you can kind of do a little bit of everything. And so about two years ago, I was going through the same conversations. I’m just having getting pitch like an investor and we’re like, no, like, we know it’s broken. Like we’re not here to not talking to me.

Speaker 2 00:10:32  Otherwise, right? Yeah.

Speaker 4 00:10:33  Like it’s broken. But you need to know, like what you’re truly getting into. And I think founders are people that are going in to go at their first or second hire are hesitant because they think, well, if I make it two, if I don’t make it look good enough, then they’re not going to want to come work for us. And I think we as people that really want to help founders from a from a go to market perspective. We just know it. So I think we need to dispel that rumor. And people do really want to help.

Speaker 4 00:11:02  But you got to get the right person in that right seat because you’re building process. You’re hiring people, you’re building, you know, you’re closing business. You could be, you know, getting into messaging. So there’s a lot of dirtiness. There’s I call it pick and shovel work, that a lot of people don’t want to do if you’re heading up a sales sales group. So about two years ago, I was seeing trends of this because I go into a company similar to what Adam and Jake were talking about, and two months into the relationship, I could see that we weren’t going to go anywhere. Like there wasn’t a path to where they were trying to get to. But as leaders now in that company, you’re kind of stuck because you’re like, okay, like when we’re all competitive by nature. So you’re like, I can fix this. I can turn it around. But you just you kind of see the writing on a wall. You don’t want to be jumping around a lot. And it’s not that.

Speaker 4 00:11:49  Maybe better questions. We could have got better answers. but I also felt I took a reflection point and I said, why am I trying to do this for one founder at a time where I get in and I’m like, stuck for six months or eight months or 12 months, or I can do it for multiple founders and have that kind of conversation around how they can help grow in scale. And so, like I started doing some work on my own. And then when Adam, was leaving the company. So the funny story, the way we kind of got connected where we didn’t even know each other probably 18 months ago, and we were going after that same job that he was kind of just talking through, and I was trying to pitch them as like, this is a you should do fractional, like I was trying to go down the fractional path and he went down the full cycle path. He outflanked me in the sales process because he actually flew out there. I did not fly out there.

Speaker 4 00:12:42  so he definitely outflanked me in that. But, you know, six months later, like, Adam and I stayed really cool. Like, we had conversations. And even though we were competing for the same job, like we had our first call without even knowing each other. And so we built that trust and bond kind of right through that process. And when we were when he went out on his own, he ended up getting a job that he got a really good, first job and then got a second job that was like just as big, if not bigger, and said, hey, do you want to just, you know, tag team on this and see what happens? In the meantime, we had started our own podcast, Revenue Reimagined. And then I realized at that point when we started working together that like, you can’t do this on your own. Like you’ll see a lot of consultants, a lot of professionals go out on their own and they can only last eight, 12 months.

Speaker 4 00:13:31  It’s just super, super difficult. because of, you know, you want to take vacation. Like there’s times you get like, you gotta help clients out, and it’s just a very difficult thing. Adam becomes our executive assistant and all the operational stuff that we do, because Jake and I hate that stuff. and Jake and I, Jake and I have known each other for a long time, all the way back to the hirevue days. and and collaborated together. So I, you know, as we were building the organization out, it felt better because I like when Jake wanted to go out on his own, I was feeling the same way. Like I would not want to do this on my own again, even though I was trying to go through it two years on my own. And, or 12 months before Adam and I kind of, like, jumped on board together.

Speaker 2 00:14:13  Hey, did you guys work together at Hirevue?

Speaker 4 00:14:16  Jake was, we were. We were.

Speaker 5 00:14:18  No, let me tell the story.

Speaker 5 00:14:21  Dale tried hiring me when I was at Hirevue. I was I would be ended up becoming a power user at one of the companies that he was leading sales for at the time. one of the early, early kind of products in the market, in the, in the kind of revenue intelligence space and, and, I ended up becoming a power user and he just never seen anyone so amazing and and just effective as me. And so he tried to hire me, but he just couldn’t afford me at the time. No. Like we became, we became fast friends. Like we we just shared a vision. We shared a perspective, on on revenue. And regardless of the timing and how things didn’t work out, we like we knew we wanted to work together or collaborate. So we partnered on stuff and kind of just built the relationship from there.

Speaker 2 00:15:08  That’s awesome. A quick aside, Hirevue is a is a great tech company from Utah, and I always like to plug Utah companies. But I heard a thing that I think you guys will appreciate.

Speaker 2 00:15:17  I was talking to someone on Wall Street the other day about recruiting and and you know, I’ve got I’ve got a college age kid who’s looking at that. And they used hirevue as like a verb, like, like, you know, they’re like, I was asking about school recruiting and like, oh, it’s all in the hirevue now everyone does the hirevue. And I don’t think Hirevue was a company. He just kind of was referring it to as this thing. It’s like a process. It’s the hirevue thing. Everyone goes through the hirevue there’s thousands of people. I’m like, wait a minute, did you just say Hirevue? That’s a company. I know the founders of that business. That’s a really cool, you know, video interview, tool set. So? So all of us have some connection there. All right.

Speaker 5 00:15:50  Mark, Mark Newman would love that.

Speaker 4 00:15:53  One of my first hires through Hirevue was on the beach. I actually did the I did the whole thing on my phone, watch the watched the video and like, hired them right away.

Speaker 2 00:16:01  Yeah, it’s it’s a it’s a very cool tool. So for those of you just listening in, Hirevue uses video interviewing and all the benefits of technology to to go through that really long, tedious process and standardize it, turn interviews into data, and then be able to use that data to to make hiring decisions. And so a lot of us have connections with that, that Utah Tech company. All right, guys, so you guys got together, who wants to define revenue reimagined today? Like, you know, what does your company do? Who your company? Who are your customers? What’s the sweet spot of a customer that might be able to use revenue reimagined? Who would like to take that one? Dale.

Speaker 3 00:16:35  All. Dale. All right. Dale.

Speaker 2 00:16:38  Revenue. Your positioning statement. Revenue management revenue reimagined helps. Who? Where?

Speaker 4 00:16:44  helps you. So we’re doing everything from, series A to public companies. and the thing is that they don’t they have challenges the same, whether you’re a public company or or like $1 million, startup.

Speaker 4 00:16:59  So there’s a lot of similarities to those. We’re helping founders, CEOs and revenue leaders build, and stabilize their foundation to stabilize their, their go to market strategy, building foundations and driving through repeatability. So those are the three. Those are three of the four stages and go to market gap. and.

Speaker 2 00:17:19  When are you when are you big enough to be able to hire revenue reimagined and when is it too small?

Speaker 4 00:17:24  It’s a good question. we have some that are pre-seed that has some capital and some money. or not, I shouldn’t say pre-seed seed, seed that I got like a seed round raise. and that’s difficult for us because we are the salespeople. like we have to do many of the sales calls. but our sweet spot would probably be in, between the five and. And 50 million would probably be, like, the real sweet spot. Okay.

Speaker 2 00:17:53  and what’s the typical length? By higher revenue. Imagine. What am I signing up for? Is it is it 90 days and you’re done? Or is it.

Speaker 2 00:17:59  We do two years. What are we looking at?

Speaker 4 00:18:01  We we we usually say 6 to 9 months is is kind of our typical. the first month is always an audit. So one of the things we learned as a team, and I screwed up way before even we had had revenue reimagined, was I want to just go in there and solve problems and fix things like we want to operate. So we’re trying to get in there as fast as we can to operate on things. And and by the time a lot of founders come to us, or CEOs or revenue leaders come to us like it’s totally broken to the point of like they need leads now, they need deals closed. They need like, but there’s no process in place. And so it’s very difficult. It’s a difficult place for us as a team because we want to go in and like put on the gloves. Pick and shovel. Start doing the work. so right now, the way we do it now is a month audit. So we go through like all in very good detail, all the information from a go to market, from marketing, customer success, culture, etc..

Speaker 4 00:18:54  and then we come up with the top 3 to 5 things that we can work on in the next 6 to 9 months. and some of our engagements go 12 to 18. Some of them will say at six, we’ve done a couple at four. We don’t do anything below four now, because the first month has to be an audit, and then the next three or at least some work to get to some trajectory and momentum.

Speaker 5 00:19:16  Julian, if I could just add something there super fast, like I was telling my wife the other day, we were on a drive and she was asking me like, what are the biggest kind of things you’ve taken away over the last year doing this on your own? And I said to her, after running audits with new clients, I could never go back to the client side without wanting to run an audit. And how weird would that be? As a as an in-house House Crow saying, okay, wait. Well, before I take the job, I’m going to run an audit for a month on this company, right? But seriously, I could never go back.

Speaker 5 00:19:44  I could never go back.

Speaker 4 00:19:46  And it goes back to the original conversation we’re having. Like we while we were asking questions to try to get some answers, like, in fact, I would, I would go so far as to do a bottoms up like high level model to try to figure out what the revenue would be. But I would like inevitably, if you’re in a if you’re in an interview process for two weeks, for example, like you just can’t ask all the right questions, they’re not going to let you into their CRM. So that becomes a tricky a tricky place.

Speaker 2 00:20:12  Yeah. So the audit is great. And I think the audit is also good for the customer. Right. Because it gives them a chance to get a third party assessment, which is always important. almost, you know, full disclosure, I’ve worked with you guys a couple of times and I’ve seen the rigor of the audit. I think that, you know, you get a whole view of, of of all the different elements of the revenue machine.

Speaker 2 00:20:34  I used to call it the birthday cake, which is so many layers of so many different functions and it’s a little overwhelming. I think people talk about the non-technical founder and how restructuring a a engineering and R&D department is really difficult. There’s a whole group of people that help people with that. If you’re a non go to market founder, I think it’s equally as intimidating, right. When you’re throwing at all the different things, we rev ups and compensation and quotas and go to market and positioning and all the different things you have to work on. It’s a lot more than just going hiring salespeople. Right. And so I think that audit gives you guys, it defines the scope of of work that needs to be addressed. And obviously you guys use that to kind of pinpoint where you want to focus first. so that’s that’s that sounds like that’s been a good, good lesson. I don’t think we’ve talked about how long you guys have been in business. Let’s really back up. When did you start? Where are you now? And, and so you’re kind of, I think, sharing some of the lessons over the, over the first, that’s big sprint as a company, right?

Speaker 3 00:21:38  Yeah.

Speaker 3 00:21:38  We’ve, So we just celebrated our official one year anniversary, a couple of months ago. but as Dale said, it started revenue reimagined. Started before it really started. The initial idea was just a podcast, really, of how do we just share great advice with founders and revenue leaders so they don’t make the same mistakes? And I think they’ll check me 30 to 45 days in. We formed the LLC. and knock on wood, man, like we’ve been blessed, ever since we, I will say, work harder than we’ve ever worked. in, in a good way, but we’re doing it with a purpose. we are well over seven figures in revenue, which is outstanding. and then we’ve returned, you know, multiples of that to our clients. And I think one of the things that’s really important to us, when you look at what we do, it’s not always linear of, oh, I revenue reimagined was here for six months. I paid them $120,000 and I got back, whatever.

Speaker 3 00:22:47  243 6120. Part of it is certainly the dollar to dollar return on investment. and it’s something we look at very carefully. But the other part of it is like, how are we setting you up for success? How much funds have we helped you raised with your investors? How much runway have we helped you save? Because the burn was just out of control and things where you shouldn’t be spending money. and I think that looking over the past year, not only are we proud of what we’ve done, but we’ve learned a lot, right? Like we never used to do. The audit wasn’t required before, like it was a suggestion. and it took transparently bringing on to clients without an audit and being 45 days in and being like, dude, like this is nothing like what we discussed. Like what? What they said they needed us for. And what we scoped this job on is totally different. And now we’re having a conversation about, like, are we going to redo the whole scope or are we going to like, throw it out the window? so we’ve learned that while it’s really important in every founder or revenue leader who reaches out to us, wants that immediate impact, right? Like it’s often like, hey Jake, great conversation on Friday.

Speaker 3 00:23:58  Like, can you guys start on Monday? and that’s just not the reality. And it’s explaining that, like, we’re doing you a disservice if we do that, and I, I hate to be cliche and use the doctor analogy, but like, you’re not going to go to your doctor, say, hi, Doctor Julian. Okay, let’s go to the operating room right now. Well, what did what’s wrong with me?

Speaker 2 00:24:16  Yeah. Can you, can you can you can we get this done with my golf round, you know. Right.

Speaker 3 00:24:19  It’s it’s a very similar thing. but it’s it’s been just over a year. I think we’re still learning how to Best work together and divide the projects. Like there’s three of us and we all have, you know, our lanes of genius. a lot of overlap, but a lot of differences. and it’s exciting to continue to to grow and learn. Like, what’s great to say. Hey, Jake, I need you to take this for me.

Speaker 3 00:24:48  and conversely, what’s great for them to just say, hey, Adam, this is operational. I don’t want to touch it. Please do it or it’s not going to get done.

Speaker 2 00:24:56  That’s awesome. Well, look, you guys are off to a great start. I think you couldn’t have timed the market better based on what we said. The unfortunate news is that, you know, we all serve growth companies and SaaS companies and tech companies. And let’s let’s face it, the last 24, 36 months have been pretty hard with the, the, end of the derp and, and the increasing rates and just more competitiveness in the market. So let’s, let’s, let’s focus on what’s what. I got my attention, the go to market gap okay. This is what everyone’s struggling with. I want to do a little Family Feud style. All right. You might have a go to market gap problem if and you know survey said who wants to give me the first? The first. I’ll go around the horn.

Speaker 2 00:25:33  I’ll start with Dale. You might have a go to market cap if.

Speaker 4 00:25:37  If you are not consistently closing deals.

Speaker 2 00:25:42  All right. You’re not consistently closing deals. If you’re not closing deals, you obviously got a problem. It’s consistently the most important thing. Or is it just you’re not closing deals at all?

Speaker 4 00:25:50  Well, it became not closing deals at all in the latest like, you know, 12 months because people are like, I need to close more business. But I think it’s more like, can we now do it at a consistent basis? Can we forecast the deals and execute at the same time?

Speaker 2 00:26:07  Yeah, I had a conversation with the CEO yesterday and they were they were waiting for deals to close and they said, would you please go talk to my crew and give me your read? Like, is it really around the corner or not? What should I believe? Like it’s incredibly hard for every tech, every business leader to understand what’s going right now and, and and to be able to point to leading indicators.

Speaker 2 00:26:29  Do I really believe it or is it just another excuse? But I think the commonality is like, hey, we didn’t close what we thought we’d close in Q3. Q3 just ended a few days ago, right? We’ve all got companies in our minds that are struggling and, why? The question is why and how do we do something about it. So, okay, that’s I don’t know where the survey said, but it’s definitely up there in the top five. All right. Okay. Jake, you are next. You might have a go to market cap problem if.

Speaker 5 00:26:55  building off what Dale said, if you’re still operating solely off of top down modeling for your forecasting and your revenue plan. Okay.

Speaker 2 00:27:04  Like not yeah, you’re using top down, which means, you know, what is top down. We we kind of huddled around Thanksgiving and pick the number and then we’re trying to reach.

Speaker 5 00:27:14  It’s not even it’s not even we it’s it’s perhaps the it’s the board and and and maybe if he’s lucky or she’s lucky the founder being involved in that number.

Speaker 5 00:27:25  Right. Okay.

Speaker 2 00:27:26  So this is of what we told the investors. Yeah, a year ago, 18 months ago. So we we have that we have to hit 5 million. And you reverse engineer from that.

Speaker 5 00:27:37  That’s right. And then everyone’s kind of figuring out the magic numbers that’s going to take to reverse engineer that number. And, and it’s a little bit of this and it’s a little bit of like, well if we well, if we pull this lever and we just all of a sudden change our close rate from 15% to 33%, we can do it right. And it’s like.

Speaker 2 00:27:59  Easy, easy numbers until they tell you what you want to hear.

Speaker 5 00:28:02  It’s magic math and nobody knows how to make it happen. We just know how it looks on paper. And that is just a fast way to to to die. Right. And so if you’re not thinking about.

Speaker 2 00:28:15  Inside the revenue department, someone does that. It’s handed over to a sales leader. That translates to quotas and burdens on salespeople, right? What does that look like and feel like in the organization when that’s that top down forecast that’s unrealistic is tried to be implemented.

Speaker 2 00:28:30  What do you what do you see.

Speaker 5 00:28:31  It looks like looks it looks like a CRO or head of sales who’s head spinning going where did this number come from. How am I going to sell this to my team? There’s a lack of belief there immediately, already going into having to get the team to believe in that it comes to a team then doesn’t understand where these numbers are coming from, but it also results in what you commonly see is and I often think why like the statistic is about 45. And that number is going down, by the way, 45 to 50% of sellers are actually hitting their number. Right. And so when you’re operating a revenue org off of a 40% attainment, like there’s no predictability. And then what it also results into is, well, we’re just you know, we came up with a magic number. We were throwing warm bodies at the at the quota. And so all of a sudden you’ve got a sales org that’s, that has grown way too fast and without fail, every time 9 to 12 months down the road, we’re facing a really painful layoff.

Speaker 5 00:29:24  That’s what it feels like. And it sucks.

Speaker 2 00:29:28  That’s a that’s a great one I and that that’s really good description of what it’s like inside. And that becomes a vicious cycle. Right. Then you start all over again. All right. Right. I think you’re so far you’re number one right there. Let’s go. Okay. Adam, you might have a go to market gap if.

Speaker 3 00:29:45  You’re consistently getting ghosted by your prospects.

Speaker 2 00:29:48  Oh, my God, I like that one. That’s that’s that’s a big ding ding ding ding ding. It’s got to be up there in the top three. Ghosted that is that is the thing you hear. You know that so difficult because you don’t know what’s going on. And so you can still you can still maintain a little bit of optimism that just drags things out. But you’re just you have no idea what’s going on. But but you.

Speaker 3 00:30:08  Can you though maintain optimism. So I was having this conversation with someone the other day when you are getting ghosted. And I was looking at someone’s deals in HubSpot and it was like, hey, Jake, I just want to follow up and see if XYZ is still of interest, you know, hey, Jake, we have this great offer.

Speaker 3 00:30:23  And like, I think my response was if we were still of interest, if we spoke to value, if we were addressing pain, if we had the right ICP, they would get back to us without us having to say to them, Hey Julian, still interested? I promise you, if I’m interested, I’m going to tell you, and this goes to and like Dale said, it starts with the right ICP. It goes to the right message, it goes to the right offer, and it goes to solving pain and providing value. If you’re not doing that and you’re getting ghosted, you have a go to market gap.

Speaker 2 00:30:53  Absolutely. And it is. It is so difficult, because you can’t you can’t point to point to things with without getting, getting real as you described. So okay. That’s that’s definitely at the top. Let’s go one more round. Dale. You might have a go to market gap if.

Speaker 4 00:31:08  If you’re losing customers faster than you can put them in the top of your funnel.

Speaker 4 00:31:13  So you have that’s a churn. Yeah. Churn happening. And you’re doing all this work on top of the funnel to get people sold. Go through the process, get them close clothes out, and then they’re either not seeing the value in the product or they are, what they sold is and what they’re being delivered, or they just can’t afford it anymore. They don’t see the actual business value to what we sold in the sales process. So you have a lot of people especially this has been happening more and more often since a lot of the economy shifted and growth at all costs kind of gone away. A lot of companies were shifting their revenue projection cycles, etc., from from the sales team to the CSS team. And so they’re like, okay, not only do you need to not let the customers leave, but you also have to like expand and upsell them because they’re already customers. They’re already talking to us. So there’s that shift in paradigm that has happened over the last 12 months. And I think it’s I think it’s a bit unfair for the CSS team because they haven’t been trained on how to sell.

Speaker 4 00:32:12  They haven’t been training like they’re trained more on like, how do we make sure the customer is using the product or service the way it was intended to be used versus like, okay, now we gotta upsell, cross-sell you into more usage of different part of the product, etc.. So, if you’re losing those customers out faster, you can put them in. You definitely have a go to market gap.

Speaker 2 00:32:35  Absolutely. And that’s that. That is a really tough position because that’s hard to recover from that. That’s the leaky bucket. Everyone’s heard about it. And that’s a that’s a really good one. I’m gonna put you up there in the top five for sure. All right Jake, you might have a go to market gap problem if.

Speaker 5 00:32:50  If you’re if you you know Adam talked about the pain. I would say even if you’re not clear on the root causes that you’re solving, like the root causes of the problems that you’re solving behind the pains for your clients. And what I mean by this is when you don’t truly understand the root cause of the problem behind those pains.

Speaker 5 00:33:09  It results in not having a clear ICP. It’s results in not understanding which persona is the true personas. Oftentimes, they see a lot of startups hyper focusing on the user persona in their messaging, and not realizing they need to actually be focusing on the buying persona that owns the root cause of the pain. Right? So this is a common issue that we see that like if if you can’t speak to those root causes and easily break it down into how we solve it, you’re just going to be chasing messaging for the next 12 to 18 months and not figuring out how we’re going to how we’re actually solving this.

Speaker 2 00:33:47  That’s that’s a huge one. Right. And I like the way you tied it. Messaging is okay. Clear. We’ll we’ll look at our messaging. But it has so many ties into your whole sales process. Right. As you just described, figuring out who you’re pitching to, what your process is, who you make sure that you you include in the process. That’s a great one. All right.

Speaker 2 00:34:06  Last, last one. Adam, you might have a go to market cap problem.

Speaker 3 00:34:10  If you’re unsure if you have the right people in the right seats related to your revenue roles, if you’re questioning whether that VP of sales, VP of marketing, Director of Sales based on performance, or based on providing the overall strategy for what you need to move the business forward? if you’re having deep questions about that and not getting the answers you need, you likely have a go to market gap.

Speaker 2 00:34:37  Absolutely. And that’s that paralysis. Right. And I’ve been there as a first time CEO. And it’s like, okay, can I just hire someone to make this problem go away? And that’s a common trap, isn’t it? Right. Yeah. I think, you know, you just you it’s the wish or the hope higher. You know, I’m going to hire that right person and they’re going to solve it all.

Speaker 4 00:34:55  Well, I think I think it extends past that a little bit because if we’re asking operational or technical people to hire, go to market experts, I think by definition that’s just a recipe for failure, because I don’t think they would ask me, Jake or Adam, to interview a developer that’s going to write Ruby on the rails to code their product.

Speaker 4 00:35:14  So I think we need to think about this in a different perspective. If we’re a CEO or a founder that is trying to hire either a sales and marketing team or you know and have hasn’t done it before, it doesn’t have that expertise. It can be very costly. And you could be burning runway for the next 6 to 12 months, because you don’t know if you’re hiring the right person.

Speaker 2 00:35:37  Exactly. You might even not. You might not even know the right language and the questions to ask. Right. And I like your analogy, like trying to hire a CTO or VP of engineering when you, you, you don’t understand what Ruby on Rails are and what sprint planning and, and sales, sales development lifecycles are.

Speaker 3 00:35:55  Yeah. I’ve never even heard of Ruby on the rails until the other day, so that sounds sounds like a song from from the 70s.

Speaker 2 00:36:04  Exactly. So. And you know, and each department creates own language for good reasons, but but in an interview process, people can take advantage of that, right? Let me let me spout up a B buzzword compliant, throw out all the all the different, buzzwords of the day.

Speaker 2 00:36:18  And, you know, you’re a founder trying to juggle with that. So having an expert to help you with that. But even more important, like, you know, you’ve talked about the assessment, if you’ve done the assessment and you know what you’re looking for, right, you use that assessment to kind of program your next, next 90 days. Right. And so if you have that, you know, you at least have a starting point. But let’s let’s talk about the framework you guys laid out in your go to market cap, session the other day. So you have the assessment and actually know the assessments your first step. And then you have a four step process where you stabilize, you build a foundation. You kind of get the repeatability and scalability. Are those the four parts of your framework that you try to bring a company through?

Speaker 4 00:36:58  Yeah. Those are the four, phases of the framework. the biggest question is where do you fall in all of those phases? So what we noticed, and one of the reasons why we built this framework was when we went into a customer, they always want repeatability or scalability, like that’s where their mind goes.

Speaker 4 00:37:16  And so of course, even after the audit and we’re going in and we’re doing some of the work, they’re like, but in the past they did it this way. And I called 300 people a day and I was able to get meetings and like, so they go through this process, but they didn’t realize, for example, they were calling SMB customers and now they want to go to enterprise. So they’re they’re making that shift into a different market segment. And you have you potentially have the wrong people in the wrong seat. People are ghosting you. You can’t close deals like all the things we just talked about. So you’re really in this stabilization mode, like you’re in like how do we stabilize what we just had? Do we get to hire new people? Do we have to do different onboarding? Do we need new messaging. Like what is the actual problem. So we we a majority of the customers that we work with, what we see is we’re, we’re starting in that stabilization phase. And they want to just skip it and go to repeatability.

Speaker 4 00:38:08  And that’s a recipe for disaster.

Speaker 2 00:38:12  yeah. So so how do you determine what the the key moves are in that stabilization phase. I mean, you describe you’ve you’ve described various levels of disarray. I’m sure you’ve walked into all sorts of them, but you can’t fix everything. So how do you determine, like what key pillars you’re going to build, that you can actually create some traction and and signs of progress on.

Speaker 4 00:38:36  Go ahead Adam you can take that one.

Speaker 3 00:38:39  Yeah I think for us it’s we get down to the basics and stabilization. Like we really start looking at the ICP, the persona. We’re going to go through all of your deals and really try to understand, like are these deals that are closing? Do they all look alike? Are we selling to the same people? Are we selling the same product? Are we selling at the same price? Our people say, are we tracking why people buy all giving the same answer? Conversely, are we tracking why people buy and or why people don’t buy? Excuse me? And are they all giving the same answer? Is that value prop resonating? It’s getting really deep and understanding who we’re selling to, how we’re selling it.

Speaker 3 00:39:20  Is that messaging running across while also making sure that we’re looking at the internal team? and that we have the right people in the right place.

Speaker 2 00:39:31  I know, Jake, you mentioned like a second level layer there. You said, hey, not only do we need to understand the messaging, but but you kind of went deeper and said, do we really understand the root cause of the problem? So a good messaging is to really just identify the problem. But now you’re saying that might not even be enough there. You have to really understand the root cause of the problem. Expand on that.

Speaker 5 00:39:53  Yeah. Because if you understand the root cause of the problem, the the the like, the framework for solving that actually becomes a simple math like conversation. It actually, becomes an equation because if you understand the current state of the business caused by that root cause. and you understand where they want to go. The future state then, like, you can really break down the the revenue gap that it takes to get there.

Speaker 5 00:40:21  And what that breaks down to is figuring out what that what the root cause is behind the issues and the, I guess, the symptoms of what they’re experiencing. So we can go solve for that specifically. And and that’s what like when you do that, that’s what helps sellers actually start what I would call Dollar Rising. The problem. Right. But if you don’t understand what the root causes of those problems and you’re focusing on pain, then you it becomes a lot harder to quantify or dollar rise that pain. And then you can’t drag your buyers through the glass when it comes to helping them understand the impact that’s having on the business.

Speaker 2 00:40:58  So really understanding the problem you’re solving for you can you can you can quantify it with ROI and dollars and be sharper on getting the person who’s experienced it or has the authority to fix it. right?

Speaker 5 00:41:10  Absolutely, absolutely.

Speaker 2 00:41:13  All right. So you’ve gone through the assessment. You’ve picked a couple things to stabilise. obviously once you’ve done that do you typically get some you know, what’s the what’s the progression to the next stage of foundation or repeatability? Yeah.

Speaker 2 00:41:31  When you say, okay, we’ve actually proven that we’ve got a couple of those things and now we can start getting to repeatability and scale. What are you looking for that that gives you the trigger to the next next gate.

Speaker 4 00:41:40  So from stabilization I think it’s a bit of momentum. Like are you getting momentum. Are you getting our deals moving through the funnel? are we getting stuck at like where are we getting stuck? You know, we’ve done an evaluation of the team. you know, we do think we have some moderate people in there, you see. and we can, you know, move forward with this team. We have a Elise’s sketch or outline of what the process looks like. Many times we go into, Places in the CRM is a mess. Like they think they have a top of funnel problem and they need more leads generated. But the reality is, like their HubSpot or their Salesforce is completely messed up because it was built out wrong and they have leads that they haven’t followed up on.

Speaker 4 00:42:23  So, it’s just untangling some of that, that tangle and seeing the momentum happening. And then once you get into, you know, are you doing sales one on one stuff, sending recaps, getting alignment on the deal, sending out mutual action or joint engagement plans, like, are you doing sales 101 stuff like sometimes in my mind I think of stabilization as like college courses, like I’m in 101 and 201. Like, can I do the one on one and 201? And then once I kind of graduate from the one on one to 2 or 1, I can move on to like 301, which would be like foundation building, making sure that house is stable on that foundation. to start building out the real sales process that we want to put into the CRM, we want to, you know, start hiring that next salesperson. Maybe not 2 or 3, but we want to hire one and make sure that everything we were stabilizing. Right. Since. Yeah. Does it really make sense? Let me let.

Speaker 2 00:43:19  Me back you up. So so you talked about some basic 101 tactics, right? Which, you know, the first one is, is what what your parents taught you send a thank you letter. Right. Basics. Right. So that is really basics. But you you introduced this concept of a joint engagement plan. And you know, I’ve been around a number of sales organizations and that that feels like it’s it’s pretty interesting and and not necessarily a foundationally understood in this space. Why don’t you walk us through this, this jump, as you call it? What is it? Why does it make sense? And how many people you think are using it today? And what’s the difference between not using it and using it?

Speaker 4 00:43:54  Yeah. I got this from just my carrying a bag days. And what I found most helpful, we all become in the sales world, the sales concierge. And we don’t really want to become that sales concierge. We want to make sure that we the sales process or the buying process, which are one the same but different.

Speaker 4 00:44:12  We have the sales process, the buying, the buyer’s buying process. And so we’re going through this together. And so we each have responsibilities through this this process. And so our responsibilities are getting new information. Make sure we’re answering questions. Your responsibility is like how are you going to buy this thing. Does it make sense. Do we have a value. What’s the business. You know, what’s the the ROI on it. And we just need to keep each other accountable. So the joint engagement plan is or the mutual action plan, which people, some people call it, is just making sure that we’re keeping each other accountable, because at some point we want to derive value for the customer, and we want to make sure that we’re delivering that value. And that is I’m going to spend $100,000, and I’m expecting 350, $400,000 in ROI. How do I really get there and when am I going to get there? The customer doesn’t even realize that they have to get there.

Speaker 3 00:45:03  And piggyback piggybacking off that, when you look at the the buyers process because there’s not enough sellers, Julian, as you know, that map the sales process to the buyers process.

Speaker 3 00:45:14  Right. You go in Salesforce or HubSpot and you you have all these ridiculous stages that are really just actions that take place and they don’t like, align with where the buyer is meeting.

Speaker 2 00:45:25  Right?

Speaker 3 00:45:26  Right, right. First meeting. Yeah. We were to say that. Hey, Jake, where are you in your buying process? Oh, I’m going to have a first meeting with Adam. Like, I probably got what Jake is going to say. Yeah, but oftentimes what we see is sellers don’t truly know what’s needed to close a deal. Like, we we know that the customer is looking at X software. When do they want to go live? To go live? When do they need to have a contract signed by to get a contract? When does it need to go to legal? How long does legal take? What is your red line process? Who else needs to be involved in the product? How have you purchased software or services like this before all of these things that you could use to build out this joint engagement plan, so that it’s very clear, you’ve established with your prospect the critical event that is causing me to look at this product as X, I need to solve it by Y.

Speaker 3 00:46:20  Great. Now let’s work backwards of everything we need to do so I can make you look really good Julian, in front of your team so that you get the solved by Y. And we get it implemented by Z to make you look like a rock star. Not enough sellers take the time to look at a deal holistically and work with their customers versus, hey, Dale, okay, we’re going to sign you by October 21st. October 1st. Here’s the contract. Well, sorry, Dale, it takes, you know, our legal process. They’re on an eight week, nine week backlog. Why didn’t you know this to start with?

Speaker 2 00:46:50  So that seems like almost too logical, right? and it feels like you’re going to run into the conflict of of trust, right? And particularly if you’re multiple vendors. right? You know, of course, I want as a seller for us to engage in a joint engagement plan and a commitment to close. But as a buyer, I might be still holding you off at arm’s length.

Speaker 2 00:47:13  I’m not sure you’re my vendor yet, or I’m not sure we’re going to get the right price yet. And so how do you handle that? And maybe sell the joint engagement plan process, as mutually beneficial as opposed to kind of a lock in trap?

Speaker 5 00:47:27  Well, here’s the here’s the interesting thing on that is even worse than sellers not knowing the process, because you could even you could even argue that a lot of sellers know the process. They just haven’t codified it before. And so, you know, putting this together allows them to go, oh, okay, I don’t have to shoot from the hip anymore. I know, I know, generally like this makes sense. But now I have a blueprint right. Or framework that to help follow. And then when things are codified, they can do it over and over and over again. That’s part of repeatability. But what what I tell sellers all the time is it’s actually beyond the you the bigger problem and why you got to get so damn good at this is because your buyers don’t know how to buy.

Speaker 5 00:48:06  I’m going to say that again, like buyers don’t know how to buy. We’re not dealing with people.

Speaker 2 00:48:09  Who’ve been in that spot for ten, 15 years. They’re probably, you know, average ten years of two. Right.

Speaker 5 00:48:15  Right. And so either they’ve never gone through a procurement process on their own before inside of the business, or they’ve never they’ve never led a purchasing process, a procurement process themselves, or they’re just not really sure how to run the process internally. And so a big piece of this and how to do what you just said is like this, this kind of aligned agreement on this is to set and establish with the buyer. Well, how do you normally go through this process? Right. What is your what is your procurement process look like and what are the next steps involved in this. And and and that allows the seller to actually analyze. Does this buyer actually know the steps they’re going to be required or involved in this process. And then because you’ve been doing it for so long, a good seller will say, well, typically what we you know, if we’re able to align on these things on this call today, next steps would look like this.

Speaker 5 00:49:02  And what we need to do is actually get a more technical deep dive with with your team on this call so that we can analyze if, if we can meet your future requirements. Or typically next steps look like, having a pricing conversation. And, and that will allow you and the buyer to start moving from a buyer seller relationship into a partner conversation. And when you start looking at it through a partnership lens and you map it out together, like as Adam laid it out, like, let’s start with the end in mind and work our way back. And you joint, you build this joint plan. Then you find yourselves in conversations with buyers where you’re not just checking in or you’re not just following up, but you’re you’re confirming with them, hey, we’re working towards this goal together and we’re missing some of these deadlines. Is this is this still a deadline that we’re going to meet together? Is this still priority, or what do we need to do to make sure that we get there together? Right.

Speaker 5 00:49:53  It it it changes the relationship.

Speaker 3 00:49:57  And part of it is where, where do you identify that your vendor of choice. Like we all, we all know that you don’t walk in. I was just having this conversation the other day. Like, very rarely are you the only people that are being looked at, right. Very, very, very rarely. And if you think you are and you’re banking your sales process that no one’s looking at competition, you’re going to be blindsided at the end. Where do we bake in in your buying process when you identify vendor of choice? And I think it’s okay to acknowledge that, right?

Speaker 2 00:50:24  I think bringing that up and saying, whenever you’re ready, take some of the awkwardness out of that. All right, guys, let’s let’s talk about some of the consistent mistakes or lessons that you guys see that people can take away from it. I don’t know if it could be a family feud, but we talked about a couple of them. What are some of the common mistakes and repeatable mistakes that you’re able to provide some some lessons for that you see across your engagements and your experience.

Speaker 4 00:50:49  Jake. And start come on Jake, you got this.

Speaker 5 00:50:53  There’s like, where do we start? Is the question like which one.

Speaker 2 00:50:57  Rank it in the notes.

Speaker 5 00:50:59  All right. So common mistakes. one of the big ones is, we often, we often see that when, when these when these, like, frameworks and these blueprints haven’t been established and, helped sellers, like, identify how to run their process. It’s a wild, wild west on the sales floor, and every rep is running their own process, every reps running their own approach, and every rep saying something different when they’re on the phone. And so, there’s just there’s no there’s no clear way to repeat what we’re doing because it actually hasn’t been captured and we haven’t captured it and we haven’t measured it. We can’t scale it.

Speaker 2 00:51:41  So you’re saying there’s there’s lack of a, an official, consistent process that you can utilize. Everyone’s doing their own thing. And is that something you guys come in and help build a consistent process that you thousand percent?

Speaker 5 00:51:54  That’s that’s is what we do.

Speaker 2 00:51:56  Playbooks. Playbooks. Stages. Processes. Tools. Right. Hiring. Hiring. Yeah. It’s a complex set of things, but. But if everyone’s doing their own thing, they probably don’t have a standardized good one that they trust. And that’s the symptom. Okay. So that’s that’s a good one, Adam. A consistent, repeatable mistake that you see that you guys, you know, work on quite often to fix.

Speaker 3 00:52:19  Oh my God. having hired a full time head of sales or VP of sales too early, thinking that because they helped tweak some things at a previous company that they’re going to be able to build your go to market at your company.

Speaker 2 00:52:33  Yeah. Why is that so hard? they hire that person too early. Is is it just is it too much for one person? Is it that they don’t come in scoping it the right way and they’re going to need to have bring in a lot more resources to fix this problem?

Speaker 6 00:52:47  Yeah. The root.

Speaker 2 00:52:48  Cause of that, that being a mistake.

Speaker 3 00:52:49  I think it’s founders want to exit founder led sales earlier than they should. they want to hire someone who is the sales expert who’s going to come in and like, if I hire Jake, he’s he’s a great VP of sales or CRO, and he’s just going to come in and close some deals. But there’s been no repeatability. There’s been no process that’s been built. The team has been mismatched. You’ve had a couple of shows that have lasted six months, two months, four months, and you have nothing documented. So you hire this head of sales and it’s like, Julian, you do it, figure it out. and one of the things that I learned relatively early in my career is building from the ground up is very different than tweaking and a VP of sales. When there is process in place, clearly documented ICP, clearly documented value prop, demonstrated repeatability of why deals are closing, how deals are closing, pricing and packaging. It’s a lot easier to make those little tweaks if you’re a VP of sales who’s been at a big company and later stage.

Speaker 2 00:53:53  Company, you’ve got.

Speaker 3 00:53:54  Yeah. And most founders want to hire like the the Facebook VP of sales or sales.

Speaker 6 00:53:58  Brands who.

Speaker 3 00:53:59  Have no business working at a startup. and it fails. And that’s why we’re so bullish on whether it be us preferably or someone else. Use go to market. Fractional executives use experts who have built before to help you lay that foundation. Before you go, spend two, three, $400,000 on someone that is going to cost you 6 to 12 months in time, and an awful and.

Speaker 2 00:54:25  The potential cost of having to redo it, which could be the death spiral in a tightly funded startup. Right?

Speaker 3 00:54:31  100%.

Speaker 2 00:54:32  Okay, Jake, consistent lesson that you guys run into a consistent, repeatable mistake.

Speaker 5 00:54:38  I you want to skip?

Speaker 6 00:54:40  I’m sorry. Excuse me?

Speaker 5 00:54:42  I know it’s.

Speaker 6 00:54:44  There’s.

Speaker 5 00:54:44  More value if I.

Speaker 6 00:54:45  I didn’t mean to put you on.

Speaker 4 00:54:48  You can take my turn.

Speaker 5 00:54:50  I would say letting Dale give advice.

Speaker 6 00:54:52  That I would say.

Speaker 4 00:54:55  I would say I asked this so many founders or revenue leaders or CEOs not being able to articulate their their value proposition to the market in under ten, 15 words.

Speaker 4 00:55:06  It’s some dreary, like they just go on and on and then they can’t really map it to the business value that is that all of their competitors can’t say or execute on. So it’s a good exercise. It sounds super simple, but it’s a very hard exercise. And I think it’s just the the ability to do that in a consistent basis, because then you can actually onboard and train your sales team to do the same thing. If you go on and on, like a three paragraph sentence on where you’re where you are different or where your value lies, I can guarantee your customer is like checked out in the first five words. So super concise and easy to articulate.

Speaker 2 00:55:50  Awesome, awesome. All right, we’re gonna do one more lightning round, which is if you have, you know, one piece of advice to to a founder or CEO who’s finds himself somewhere in this, in this challenging cycle, you know, what would it be, Jake?

Speaker 5 00:56:06  Do you not hire a VP of sales too early? Don’t jump the gun there.

Speaker 5 00:56:10  It’s it is way too tempting. It’s way too easy to pass the buck. and it’s perhaps the fastest way to overlook the the symptoms of what are truly like the problems of your business at the current state. So do not hire a leader before you’re ready for that. That leader.

Speaker 2 00:56:32  That’s good advice, Adam.

Speaker 3 00:56:34  Document, document, document. Everything has to be documented. It cannot live in your head. I tell people all the time, I don’t care if it’s an Apple Notes Google Drive text. Like I don’t care where you document it, but you gotta get it down.

Speaker 2 00:56:48  Document what’s working.

Speaker 3 00:56:51  And what’s not and.

Speaker 2 00:56:52  What’s lost is.

Speaker 3 00:56:52  Just as important.

Speaker 2 00:56:54  Okay, excellent. Good stuff. Dale. You can do one thing. You’re stuck in this quagmire, in the gap. What’s one thing you can do tomorrow?

Speaker 4 00:57:05  get your pick and shovel out and start continuing to sell on your own. And not only to your, to your network, but people you don’t know. So a lot of times we go into places and they’ve exhausted their network or they’ve been successful, you know, selling to 10 to 20 of the people they know, but they haven’t tried to go outside of that comfort zone.

Speaker 4 00:57:27  And so just go outside your comfort zone and start cold calling or start cold emailing and trying to get that, that, that process down. So as you’re hiring people and you see how the process is going, you can’t just say, well, if you call 100 people, then you should be getting X number of leads and you should like, actually do the work so that you can have empathy, empathy and sympathy through that process. When you’re asking people to do things that you don’t, you haven’t done.

Speaker 6 00:57:54  Right.

Speaker 2 00:57:55  You know, do it yourself so you can teach others to do it. So so, you know, sticking that grind founder led sales. That’s great stuff. Okay. if if, obviously the other one you could do is you can hire some experts, you can find you guys at Revenue reimagined.com. You’ve got the podcast, the Revenue Reimagined, podcast. And then if you want to do a little studying before that, you guys have any books you might recommend, that people can kind of go to school on and at least learn the language so they can call you and feel like they they’re speaking the language of, revenue excellence.

Speaker 5 00:58:29  You know, one like, I think one book that every founder should just pick up and read as early as possible, just understand the mechanics and basic functions of a sales organization. Is Mark Wahlberg’s book The Sales Acceleration Formula that that is like a must read book for every founder and every early stage revenue team to every scaled, mature revenue team.

Speaker 2 00:58:53  I like that one. That’s a great idea. Adam, do you have a recommendation?

Speaker 3 00:58:57  Yeah, I mean, there there’s there’s a few back here.

Speaker 6 00:59:00  That’s right.

Speaker 3 00:59:01  If I’m going to pick one, one of my favorites right now is what a unicorn knows. you know, if you’re really going to look at how to scale, and what you need to do to get where you want to go and going about it the right way. it’s one of my local favorites. One of my recent favorites.

Speaker 2 00:59:17  What a unicorn knows. I like that. All right, Dale, what would you recommend?

Speaker 4 00:59:22  Yeah, I think I’ll go off. off the beaten path here a little bit and talk about the, extreme ownership from Jocko Willing.

Speaker 4 00:59:32  that’s just like, every day making sure that you as a founder, CEO, revenue leader, you’re taking that accountability, for the process. And even if some of the product challenges are happening or some of the team challenges are happening like it all rolls back into you and it starts from the top. So Extreme Ownership is a great book.

Speaker 2 00:59:53  Awesome. Well, hey guys, this was a great conversation. I know that a lot. A lot of our, community and listeners are going to be excited to hear about it because unfortunately, a lot of people do have revenue challenges. And it’s exciting to to see that you guys are solving them with precision and really, hitting your stride there. People can find you at Revenue reimagined.com, and we hope to see you at the Growth Elevated Conference. We can have some great conversations.

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Speaker 1 01:00:31  If you’d like more resources on how to become a better leader in business, we invite you to visit us at Growth elevated.com. We’ll be back next week with more insight from another great tech leader. Thank you.