(482) JD Miller’s CRO Playbook for PE-Backed Companies - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48h-SSIcSis

Transcript: (00:01) so it's it's the excitement it's the pace I guess also it's it's a little less daunting thinking about signing up for a 10year early stage Venture gig where for liquidity you're you're like seven to 12 years out the possibly that too um you know but for me it's always been um you know you buy a company with an investment thesis that you know what you're supposed to get done you know what you're supposed to do across a Time Horizon and I love to focus an Ute on projects and so kind of rallying everyone around you know this new (00:35) expansion or this new product development we're going to do or whatever it is and having an end dat in mind is is really helpful and motivational and then you may stay with the company for the next buyer who's going to have a different investment thesis and and kind of you know hand off the Baton to to run the next part of the course which can also be really [Music] interesting hello and welcome to the red Vue leadership podcast by Topline I'm your host Kyle Norton C owner. (01:06) com and every Wednesday we dive deep into the strategies and tactics being used to drive success by the best Revenue leaders in the world so join me as I sit down with Revenue operators to discuss actionable Frameworks that you can Implement in your business today with no fluff no sales pitches and no platitudes [Music] this episode of the revenue leadership podcast is brought to you by superhuman superhuman is an AI powered email app that helps sellers respond collaborate and close faster with features like inbox triage automatic reminders and (01:49) collaborative email drafts reps can filter out distractions to focus on what they do best selling get the email experience that keeps deals moving try superhuman free for 1 month at Super superh human.com Pavilion and today my guest is JD Miller who brings over 20 years of Revenue leadership and experience at four different private Equity back software companies uh he's got six exits under his belt four of which were in a leadership role and has recently written a book called The C's guide to winning in private Equity uh so you can probably (02:26) take a guess what we're going to be talking about today and the book comes out on January 14th uh but is available for pre-order everywhere that good books are sold uh so welcome to the show JD thanks for coming on thanks for having me Kyle it's great to be here uh so tell I gave a little tiny intro but give people your 60c background so they know a little bit about you sure uh I'm JD Miller I've worked in B2B Tech sales for about 25 years um most of it has been in private Equity most of it has been in European companies coming to the US um (03:00) lately I've been working uh at a private Equity Firm itself I worked for five Aros Capital Partners as a uh operating adviser to their portfolio of 36 companies so I get to be mentor to their sales and marketing leaders very cool and so I think you have a good story about how you got into sales and a little and your first exit is tied into that so so let's start there as our uh warm-up question tell tell the people the story sure so I never actually intended to go into sales I grew up in the sub of Chicago and you (03:32) know in the 90s everyone was either going to be a doctor a lawyer or an engineer and so I went to college thinking I was going to go to law school and I did a very traditional pre-law degree in communication philosophy and comparative literature and then the summer before law school began I did an internship in the Clinton White House which taught me that um the lawyers weren't having a lot of fun and so I went back to the university and said I'm not going to go to law school I'm not going to be a professional philosopher (04:00) her I'm not going to be a professional literature comparer so what can I do with my communication degree and I wound up doing a masters in the 90s when the internet was just starting to to come into being and the research was really looking at we knew everything about how groups form trust and how groups are formed in the physical world what does that look like online and so a year and a half later I had this master's degree in social networking and a small. (04:26) com Came Calling that said we didn't know that anyone could get a degree in the technology we're building and it was a sales job so I began as employee number 26 at this company called introspect six years later we've been acquired by vignette um vignette was the largest tech IPO until Google took the title from us we went with a n billion doll valuation and so in six short years I got to see everything from really small startup to really big publicly traded company and all the stages in between and I was just hooked that that's what I (04:59) wanted to do for the rest of my life very cool and so now owned by open text it is yes so back in the day uh we used say vignette was the inventor of credit card processing online the inventor of uh you know Amazon if you bought this book you probably want to buy this book um and so there was a time when about 65% of the world's websites were built on our technology wow very cool and then a couple more stops in various levels of of Revenue leadership so um let's talk a little bit about your experience in leadership in private Equity so like the (05:37) give give folks the background of um some of these places and and sort of the scale uh of some of these teams getting up to modus yeah absolutely so you know introspect when we started was $750,000 in revenue and grew to be very very large and as a first job out of college I was really spoiled because I thought why doesn't everyone just get into Tech sales this is the easiest thing ever you know our pitch was I'm calling from the internet do you need a website and you know in Chicago you know American Airlines needed their first (06:09) ever website and newspapers needed their first ever website so you know naively my next job I went to a small startup that was doing CRM software and social networking um ultimately it was sold to Lexus Nexus uh because the product had um the product had a lot to do with social networking and how lawyers meet one another online um so about 15 million in Revenue when we started again Lexus Nexus itself was a big giant kind of conglomerate um and then that's really where I first started to get trained in how to manage people so I (06:39) began as an individual contributor Lexus Nexus gave me a year-long leadership development class um to learn how to manage salespeople and then that just spawned the rest of the career was constantly tech companies that were looking for big growth maybe they're going to do a merger in an acquisition with someone uh maybe they were preparing for IPO and so just became a a sequence of continually bigger and bigger and bigger companies um most of my life has been spent with companies at about 50 million in ARR growing to maybe (07:11) 300 million um and sometimes that's organic sometimes that's m&a and and usually it's combination of both and what was the first private Equity backed job uh so that that Lexus Nexus one before it was acquired by Lexus before it was acquired by Lexus Nexus it was owned by PE okay and then West Monroe runzheimer those were pre private Equity posts like I'm curious the yeah lots of mixes in there so uh West Monro Partners was the Anderson Consulting uh group in Chicago that after Enron sort of collapsed um westbro started on their own and then uh (07:52) ultimately we merged with uh bearing point to become the bearing point us kind of arm of that that company um run timer we'll come back to later on and then workplace systems was owned by Lloyd's development Capital uh a UK company coming to the US Bravo solution uh was an Italian company uh owned by PE coming to the US uh ultimately sold to excel KKR then we had modus which was owned by Tomo Bravo and most recently I've been the cro at Canada uh which is another XL KKR portfolio company okay it's funny I when I talk to people who (08:28) have had one PE gig they tend to stick there you know the the the private Equity backer with good people you see them just bring along to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing and and um I have a friend who's just fallen into this and very quickly he's like oh yeah like you know we're going to do this for three years and they already want me to do the next thing and that'll be another threeyear stint that what what is it that you think like pulls people in uh to falling into this this out of the Venture game and then (09:02) just like sticking so for me it's it's a focus constantly on the exit um it's a really high pace of we've got to accomplish things and we've got to accomplish them really fast so I sometimes describe private Equity is like house flipping with tech companies you go find a company that's got really strong bones and then you look at you know what can we do in my case to you know not renovate the kitchen but um put more money into the sales and marketing engine or help with International expansion and make that house even (09:32) bigger so that someone else can pick it up later on and most PE firms are operating on like a three to fiveyear investment Horizon and so while the things we do are exactly the same as anyone else you know it's the fundamentals of running a good business are are the same everywhere PE puts a a really nice Cadence and a really nice drive that we don't have a lot of time to waste so let's get on it and and let's get moving so it's it's the excitement it's the pace I guess also it's a little less daunting thinking (10:02) about signing up for a 10-year early stage Venture gig where for liquidity you're you're like seven to 12 years out the possibly that too um you know but for me it's always been um you know you buy a company with an investment thesis that you know what you're supposed to get done you know what you're supposed to do across a Time Horizon and I love to focus and execute on projects and so kind of rallying everyone around you know this new expansion or this new product development we're going to do or whatever it is and having an end dat in (10:35) mind is is really helpful and motivational and then you may stay with the company for the next buyer who's going to have a different investment thesis and and kind of you know hand off the Baton to to run the next part of the course which can also be really interesting how often do people stay through the second leg of that Journey um I think it depends on the level in the organization there was a a Harvard Business Review study that so the average tenure of a cro in any company is about 18 months um so it's (11:05) you know at at that level it's probably pretty rare um you know for the rest of the team certainly I see sellers with lots of long longevity people in product development and other parts of the organization but part of the reason I wrote the book is uh I really want to help other cro live past that 18 month 10 and I think there are a couple of basic things that we can do with communicating with our board and setting expectations on performance that can really extend that time and create value for the companies we work for okay so (11:37) and we'll we'll certainly unpack a bunch of this and unpack some of the guide um curious before we get there how is being a cro in a private equity-backed company different than being a a c inventure I'm not sure that it really is um you know I think ultimately the C's job is to to drive Revenue into the business um and you know you and your board or you and your owner uh have a sense of what that Target is supposed to supposed to be um I think a cro at a private Equity back business probably has a bigger budget so you're probably (12:14) playing BG budget okay yeah I mean I think venture capital is you know and I haven't done a ton to venture myself but yeah I always think of that as like a startup company moving to be maybe 2030 million in ARR yeah and for me the PE firms I've started with you know we're starting at the 30 million Mark and we're taking them further on down the path right and so it tends to be a bit more of established company uh it tends to be bigger teams that then gives us some bigger budgets to play with um you know hiring in New geographies Or doing (12:45) some exciting more things in marketing that maybe a true startup doesn't actually get to get to work with interesting so I've only done Venture and we'll learn from each other then yeah exactly I mean I worked at at Shopify which was obviously public at the time but um in my head my assumption is that there's less money in private Equity because they're trying to acquire a company strip out any like ex extra cost they're trying to make it more fit cranky but duh and then like get that ready for the for the next buyer um so (13:18) it's interesting to for you to say that there could be more money and I guess there's more money for Revenue driving things well and you know I think actually you know private Equity talks a lot about the rule of 40 is sort of the best investment that we have and so you know this means we're looking at what your the profitability of the business is and we're looking at the growth and together you know great run company those are going to add up to be 40 or more so really deal by deal or Company by company you might have a a company (13:49) that's losing money uh but is growing at you know 50% 60% year-over-year um you might you might see the reverse that you know it's a a company that's growing 18 20% a year and you you really want to find that 20% margin to make them add up so it really is depends on your unique context I think yeah that makes sense I I was listening to a podcast on invest like the best with Brad Jacobs so he's apparently like one of the top private Equity m&a guys of all time he's done 500 deals and he's worth like billions of dollars himself (14:27) and so he was going through a bunch of his Playbook um in terms of like the how he identifies opportunities and wins deals and then what he does when he takes it over a lot of him his was like consolidating multiple companies stripping out a bunch of GNA cost finding areas to to drive growth either in New Markets or bringing together complimentary products so I think that's probably where I'm thinking is like his messaging is all about like streamlining and making more efficient but he does talk about you know investing in growth (14:58) and so as a CR o it's uh that jives that's interesting I sorry I I think you'll find different PE firms will sort of specialize in different things you know they're definitely growth investment firms or efficiency firms uh so when you're shopping your company across PE you know it's it's really getting clear on what their investment case is and and does that jive with what you're where you're trying to take your business to okay so maybe not as different as we would have otherwise thought uh which is interesting and so um talk me through (15:32) modus so you you came in as the company was bought and then you had a almost a fiveyear stint there as cro so talk talk talk me through some of that story and then I'd love to to dig into the lessons yeah really interesting and and the first lesson for me is never burn a bridge I had been the head of sales at a company called Bruner International in Wisconsin um four or five years before modus and and you know runer is a company that probably you've never heard of but you've definitely touched their product if you've ever received 56 cents (16:07) a mile in reimbursement for driving your car for work runer is the company that sets that rate for the IRS and has done it for 85 years and so over time you know runer had grown into this company that has this cool vehicle reimbursement product and uh collects a lot of research on the price of gas and price of a lot of Commodities around the world and then kind of packag that so sells it along the way somebody in Boston created a a company that was modus that became a competitor uh to runzheimer and actually (16:38) right as I was leaving runzheimer it was when we first started to see modus as a competitor so fast forward a few years I had worked with workplace systems which actually shifi was a big partner of ours there uh and I had worked with Bravo solution and as we were getting ready to sell Bravo solution the next investor everyone was looking through the BIOS in the investor pack and saying tell me a little bit more about this job at runer and you know maybe I'm not that smart but when 17 or 18 people ask you the (17:05) same question around this very esoteric job you know something must be going on here because they were thinking about buying modus yeah and so um So eventually uh I got connected with the CEO at modus and uh we had a great conversation about um hey I'm just getting ready to leave Bravo solution and he said that's that's really interesting we're just getting ready to get bought by Bravo who's also going to buy runer and put them together would you come on as a consultant and help us he said because when we merged with (17:37) runer you probably hired most of that sales team uh and do you still have a good relationship there and thankfully I did uh so I began as really a consultant that was going to be on board for two months just sort of teaching people what Waterford Wisconsin looks like and making some introductions and then a series of events happened where the C of modus and of runer both went off to do other things and that seat was empty and so the the CEO and Tomo Bravo the PE firm said you know JD would you step in and would you do this job and it wound (18:09) up being a great investment for them uh Toma I think says it's the seventh best investment they've ever had in Tech investing um and you know we we had a a great terrific run taking what was maybe 30 sales people when I started to a sales and marketing team of just under 200 five or six years later and all of the growth and and customer stuff that goes with that was just a really cool time for me 30s a how many hundred uh just under 200 wow in sales marketing bdrs and all the rest of it yeah okay that's awesome and so what was what were (18:46) the things that you had to change put in place what were the big sort of Innovations to lead to the seventh best investment the Toma Bravo who's very good at this so that says a lot uh yeah so one of the things one of the things I I love from them that uh you know it actually you'll you'll see flavors of it in my own book too is they're very clear early on and helping everybody articulate what is the value creation plan of this company and so from day one you know we start with an annual plan that says if we're going (19:18) to grow 20% this year or 30% this year how are we going to do it and it's not just setting a number of you know go sell 30 million and cross your fingers and hope that you're going to get there but if we're going to sell $30 million this year how much of that is going to be new logo business how much of that is going to be selling products to the install base how much of that is going to be um growth within your install base you know do you have contracts that allow for price increases are your customers happy are they going to accept (19:45) those price increases and really plotting out month by month team by team all of the bets that you're making that are going to add up to your to your annual plan and then they also have a really good Rhythm and Cadence that I think again every well-run company should have which is a weekly flash report you know we set out this plan for the year within this quarter or within this month here's what we should have done with new logo here's what we should have done with price increases here's how many customers we are expecting to (20:14) churn or not how did this week's activity measure against that and are we ahead of plan or behind plan and where it's not working why isn't it working what can we do about it what can we adjust in course correct to make next week even better and so it's this constant communication between you know me as the C my sales leaders my individual contributors the rest of the C team and the private Equity Firm board all talking in really specific detail about the business plan what's gone well what's not and do we collectively agree (20:46) on what the next step is uh and it drives a really great outcome that level of rigor is definitely more rare I would say venture-backed businesses oftentimes they're growing so fast you're just sort of sort of like catching demand and flying by the seat to your pants but I would definitely say like the PE folks that I've spent time with seem to bring a rigor and it's sort of a centralized rigor from the PE that then emanates through the full portfolio um so that makes a ton of sense so you started with an annual plan (21:21) established a really good Rhythm what else did you change strategically about the business to to drive growth and and to improve EV yeah so there um we also really realized that vehicle reimbursement Market is a very broad Market um I think like one in six American workers is a potential customer of of that product and so we also started to talk about we're still a pretty small company in a very big Market who's our ICP who's our ideal customer profile what's the industries that we're going to pursue who's the (21:56) type of person that we're going to pursue and really found three tiers of companies they're the big giant Enterprises like the big soda Distributors and big grocery store chains who have all these people you know stocking shelves and that needed a a really highly skilled Enterprise sales team then there is sort of a mid-market segment um so kind of the typical businesses that you know maybe you know in your local community but not big National names and then there's also a lot of you know really SMB small businesses maybe 10 employees companies (22:29) 15 employee companies who also can benefit from the product and so we divided the sales team into those three segments you know big Enterprise sales team our most senior sellers who can do the long complicated processes with multiple decision makers most of my sellers run in that mid-market and then working with our our marketing and our inside sales or bdr team to have a really fast digital motion that says you know if you're a tiny company that's going to spend $5,000 with us I can't spend a lot of money selling to you (22:58) either I can absolutely give you a great experience you know self-serving with video education and emails and you know the you know kind of daily or weekly webinars that you could hop on to and get sold to with you know a group of other folks doing the same thing and then kind of instrumenting those and recognizing that the expectations of a seller on each of those teams is going to be different um you know how do I manage that SMB team it's all about volume and it's all about Connection rates and you know average deal cycles (23:32) that are like six or seven days um it's very different to manage that kind of seller than it is for an Enterprise seller whose cycle might be you know three or four months or five months but average deal size going to be in the six or seven figures um and so really kind of getting the right teams in place and the right metrics for each those was uh was a really key part of it okay so so part of the Playbook is structure basically go to market org design and segmentation did you were you opening up new markets as (24:03) well I say really about existing Market done better we're opening new Industries for sure you know if you think about if I start with this Market that one in six Americans potentially could buy uh you know a 30 person sales team is going to be stretched really thin trying to cover all of that um and so really we added a lot of sellers too um that let us have kind of industry focuses or or size based focuses still largely the same geographies for us that that kind North American Focus helped us there and then over the (24:38) course of five years of course we launched new products um around 2019 uh you remember covid 201920 shut everyone down and our core customer was someone who got in their car and drove for work and suddenly all of these stay at home orders you know no one is driving for work but our product teams really said okay this infrastructure that we've got in place to track what's the price of gas today and how do I reimburse people differently you know with different cars can absolutely be applied to the home office environment (25:11) and you know the price of electricity for your home office or the rent done your you know two-bedroom square foot apartment um is different and so we created a reimbursement for the stay-at-home worker and the you know kind of Legally appropriate IRS certified you know stiens for home office workers to reimburse them for doing that kind of work um now we never anticipated that at the beginning of the journey um but you know really Flex that muscle to say okay we understand a lot of the same kind of messages we (25:42) understand the same kind of buyers how do we put this machine and turn it slightly with a new product and then there were some Acquisitions around cell phone companies and cell phone reimbursements that you know really rounded out I think what you would see the the total motus picture today actually haven't been to that company in three or four years so I'd have to visit exactly what they're selling but um at the time I left it was um you know certainly had grown on a number of Dimensions uh organic growth new (26:07) products new markets um and new kind of ideas right and we were talking before we turned on the recorder but I have the new CR of modus Vanessa brandwin coming on in a couple weeks so we'll get the the book and book end of this story oh fantastic I can't wait Vanessa and I have connected on LinkedIn but we I don't think we've ever spoken to each other so uh I'll have to tune in and hear her say how terrible this company was that was L by the last guy and as she's come in and taking it to the next [Music] level gu. a enables your CEO subject (26:46) matter experts and other senior leaders to engage prospects directly creating meaningful connections and boosting response rates with just one click your team can strategically involve senior staff to make your Outreach more credible and effective Empower your GTM team to orchestrate your outbound process and say yes to yes. a that's ye ss. (27:08) aai yeah yeah well it'll be cool to it'll be cool to hear that part of the story she's a stud so I'm sure uh there's lots lots to dig into and so how much of this was part of the original investment thesis so because you uh got operationally more rigorous made sure that plan was diligent expanded in terms of the addressable Market New Industries scaled the team launched new products like was this all part of the hey we were going to take runer and modus put them together and then these are the six things or how much of that was (27:46) discovered discovered as you were running the company yeah so I think when a PE firm invest in a company they've got a whole range of thesis and you know you hear you hear a uh people talk about the return multiple are we going to get double our money back 2x return or 3x return a 4X return or a more X and so I think when someone makes a business case and again I'm I'm not the smart guy in the room who decides what to buy a company for I'm just the operator and executor but I know that they always come and say you know our thesis is (28:19) we're gonna absolutely do this thing and if I do this thing well you know that should get us our money back and that'll get us the 2x return and then here are some ideas of two or three other things that we could do that if you know one or two of those go really well you know we'll get a big bigger return and sometimes and I think at modus we you know we were really fortunate that the whole laundery list of possibilities ultimately were were things that we were able to action on and you know ultimately led us to a great place at (28:48) the end of the day um I certainly didn't expect it would be that run when I began you know I really thought it would be a a shorter tenure and a you know kind of an integration of two companies and now you've got a bigger company that does the same thing but was so fun to get to play in all of these other kind of spaces very cool what was that range that you talked about the r the ranges of outcomes um I mean private Equity returns are all over the place right but if you think about that house flipping environment um you know you spent some (29:19) money on the house when you sell it the next time you know double your money would be great three times return is is really good and then you know four and more are fantastic outcomes for return was was the word yes yeah so I say like a 3X return so I bought it for this much money and I got three times that you know when we sold it later very cool um so let's talk about the guide to winning in PE i' would love for you to unpack sort of the the structure of the book and what are some of the key themes and I'll have a bunch of questions as we go (29:56) yeah absolutely so you you know we just talked a lot about um Tomo Bravo's leadership with modus they had a lot to teach me is as how to be a great cro and CMO and I've seen that with Excel KKR places that I worked and you know all of these different private Equity firms all have sort of a Playbook of of ideas and now today at um Rothschild 5 Aros where I'm an adviser I realized that the portfolio of companies I'm I'm working with all tend to have the same sorts of problems or challenges um or I at least find myself pulling out (30:31) the same templates over and over and over again so I compiled them into a book and it's really structured as sort of a year in the life of a cro at a peack company and so it begins with your annual planning which actually doesn't start on January 1 your plan probably starts around yeah you know September October laying out what is the the program going to be and the first chapter is really needy about how do you design the annual plan and all of the inputs that go in there um there's a downloadable template to help (31:00) people do that I'll share the link with you uh later on and then you know you're going to start January 1 with your annual plan how do you roll that out into comp and territories and quotas and communicate that to your team how do you have an amazing sales kickoff to tell everyone the important messages that they need to learn and explain we're going to win in the in the coming year when we do these following things how do you motivate your team members to do that and then it starts to look at what are those reporting and inspection (31:27) cadences you know we we need to inspect what we expect um so what is a a weekly Cadence like with one-on ones with the seller what is the weekly Cadence like with the sales manager and the cro what is the you know weekly monthly quarterly Cadence between the cro and the executive team and the executive team and the board of directors to talk about you know how we're progressing and how do we adapt over time and then you know life happens so team members turn over or we going to go do growth plans um you know how do we identify great talent how (32:03) do we model that into the business how do we have a great interviewing process to make sure we're recruiting the talent that has the skills that we want to have and then kind of continuing on all the way through the end of the year and then ultimately the tail end the book is because it's private Equity specific you know how do you as a cro get ready for that handing of the Baton to the next person um so you know what is what is the you know note that I leave maybe to Vanessa at Motas to say here's what you're here's what you're you know (32:32) getting on board with here's what your team looks like how do you negotiate your own next best best deal um and how do you you know think about compensation and all the rest of that stuff to pick it up and do it again and and continue to help people grow and build very cool so I want to double click into a bunch of this stuff so uh let's start with annual planning we are it's December when we're recording this people will have just come out of annual planning uh so this will be fresh in people's mind what what does a great annual planning (33:02) process look like to you um so for me an annual plan is is always built on fact not hope and I'm really maniacal in my planning process it drives a lot of people nuts that I refuse to sign off on a number until we can say exactly why we think we're going to get there and so you know you're you have a you have a Target to grow 20 million next year 30 million next year what are the very specific things that you're expecting from each team that's going to add up to that 20 or 30 million we start and you know my my PhD (33:36) background tells me that the best predictor of future performance is past performance so let's look at our team and if we just keep the same team members in place today as we had last year you know what's their win rate how long does it take a new seller to ramp um you know all of those kinds of things how many appointments did they need in order to get to you know a certain dollar amount that context if we just fast forward the tape a year what's the performance we're going to see from new logo there um we also need to take into account things (34:06) like attrition you know people leave the organization all the time they have babies or they get promotions at other companies how frequently does that happen what months does that happen in how long does it take HR to recruit the backup uh the replacement person how long will it take that new replacement person to come up to speed and get their first deal and then be you know fully rant so all of that kind of calculation is going into some piece of my new logo number and then we look at the same kind of riger on the install base you can (34:35) declare today because you've got a copy of every one of your contracts which customers are up for renewal in which month hopefully you've got some customer their health like of churn yeah all of that and start to predict month by month which customers are going to churn which customers are going to accept the price increase etc etc and then you've got your cross sell up Zone into to the install base you know what's your what is your green green field or wh space account um so I've got 12 modules to sell which customers have three and (35:07) which customers are most likely to take that fourth or fifth um what do we know about their budget cycle their buying cycle when might that happen so I can start to plant those into uh this big kind of calendar and then anything else you're going to do un natural you know when are we going to launch a new product um how long do we think it'll take uh to train the sales team on it to get the first deal to get the first five deals to make it part of the total bundle are we considering m&a when would that happen in the year and model all of (35:35) that out so you think about this annual plan is you know I describe it as a big Excel spreadsheet you know in practice you probably some other tools that way but you know it's kind of row by row each of the things that are going to happen and then column by column all of the months of the year and that's your road map that you then start you know executing against do that make sense and there's always an expect to take that and then do better like the you know the board and the CEO they're paying us to do better and and I think we're from a (36:07) lot of the conversations I have where cro get jammed up is this is a this is a very conservative way to plan you know the it's it's built on today's numbers you're factoring it all in and what ends up happening is co goes well that gets us to 70% but I want to grow 110% or that gets us to 15 and I want 25 so like give me the 25 plan your plan is 25 and uh cros don't necessarily want to say hey that can't be done because then your neck is sort of on the on the line um they they oftentimes a CO will say well I'm GNA go find that somebody who (36:50) can do it whether or not they can or cannot it ends up just being this is the person who says they can and so how do you work with a board a finance team a CEO to come to like a realistic ending spot of where you know you're not sandbagging as a cro and giving yourself you know like an easy plan because no one's going to sign off on that versus you're sign not signing up for something that uh you're set up to fail like any tips for that conversation yeah thank you because that actually is the second half of annual planning so thanks (37:27) for that you go because you're exactly right once you've built built the plan is guaranteed to not be what what the board or your executive team or your CFO want they always want something more um so the next thing and I think this is what can make me an unpopular person at the table during planning is I'm happy to sign up for another number if we can all collectively agree on what are the bets that we think are going to get there and so what are some of the common things you know are we going to invest in some sales training what do we think (37:56) is a realistic performance Improvement on that you know if your plan is go take a two-day training class and the sellers are going to be 20% more effective it's probably a pretty bad bet um but you know can we agree and align on do we think it's 2% better 5% better how much longer after training do we think that's going to take you know so that might be one thing it might be go hire a bunch more people we've got a huge Tam go hire some more sellers okay great you know let's align on how many sellers can we reason ably recruit on what time period (38:31) how many sellers are we culturally ready to bring into the organization because you can't just triple the size of your sales team overnight without you know cultural impacts all over the place and then let's have another line in our plan that says okay new Sellers and the expected ramping performance and on and on and on down you know new product launch we're going to go buy something you know we're going to bundle you know widget B with every with every new deal we go forward we're going to do a 10% price increase what whatever those are (38:59) kind of modeling each of those so that then you know the bigger thing isn't the plan the bigger thing is the measurement against the plan that every week every month we then go look at this plan and we say here's what we expected to happen on all these dimensions are we getting the number yes or no and if we're not which one is missing uh you know I I have outlived that 18-month tenure in in most of my career and it's not because I came to the board every month and said hey we're doing exactly what you expected and I'm well over quota but (39:31) when I haven't been over quota I've been able to be really clear about saying here is the Assumption we had going into this month that didn't get met or we didn't hire those sellers fast enough or that product we thought it was going to launch in April now it's not going to launch until September and so you can actually measure you know I'm not just a million dollars behind plan but I'm the million dollars that really was expected on this line item and then from there what do we want to do about it do you want to accept the new reality do you (40:01) want to put some more money to get that product you know coming up faster to speed or what but I think that's what distinguishes C with long tenure from C with short you know is the cro who sits in a box and just says I'm GNA deliver a number don't ask me how as soon as they miss they're in big trouble a c who can bring all the people together and have everyone aligned on what are we trying to do how will we know when it's working is going to get a lot more grace than if it's not working out um and everyone (40:32) understands why you've got the confidence of your board and your team that's going to give you some more Runway to to course correct right there's more people who were involved in the planning that didn't work or at least they have a more detailed understanding of the in the ins and outs the inputs and the outputs and and why they didn't get there that's that's really great advice one of the other things that I tell folks because I think this happens a lot more in Venture where you know border Co will just like make (41:04) up a number and be like that's the one we want I I tell them to you it's you know an objection handling technique use yes and say okay you want uh 70% growth instead of 50% growth no problem here's what we need right uh you know I'm going to go double the bdr team I need the marketing team to sign up for a number that's 40% higher I want to add an enablement uh headcount to the plan so that we can improve training and productivity and then often times the answer is like whoa whoa whoa like we can't spend all that much money but at (41:37) least now we're having a trade-offs conversation right we're not saying uh sign up for the plan or don't sign up for the plan we're we're having a conversation around the details and we're on the same side of the table and so you're saying yes we can get to it but then also going back with the required inputs which forces everybody else to do the calculation that we all have to do um and that is a I think those are that's a similar approach to what you're saying in terms of bets but like yes and is sort is sort of the (42:10) technique well if you're doing the planning with finance and CEO early as you're talking about right and that's why you have to start early because it really is enrolling the rest of the organization yes I'm signing up for a number but when I sign up for a number that also means my marketing team is signing up for a number my HR team is signing up for a recruiting number uh they're signing up for a how fast and a service level you know Replacements and all of that sort of stuff and the more of that we can put in the plan the (42:42) better so I also describe this kind sort of wind creation waterfall and really just within my go to marketing organization to start with so waterfall yep so you know I'm a seller that's got a million dollar quota how do we get there well if I look over you know history my average deal for easy math is $100,000 so next year I've got to do 10 deals at $100,000 well what did history tell me it took to close a $100,000 deal do I win one out of three do I win one out of four do I win one out of five that then means how many opportunities do I have (43:17) to have right to get an opportunity how many first appointments or how many first demos did I have to have to get to that first demo how many cold calls did an SDR have to have or how much money did marketing need to spend on no banner ads and retargeting all the rest of it because it's you know the end result the final number is revenue but there are all of these leading indicators that can tell us a lot earlier you know are you on track or are you not on track and getting everyone aligned on that so that my goal is the revenue number but (43:48) marketing knows what their goal is and everyone else knows what their their piece is is really what's going to get us to a successful Place yeah and and if that can be predetermined then it's not excuse making after the fact it's it's right hey this is what this is what we all agreed to this is where we landed ended up you can speak dispassionately about hey it's not marketing's fault but we can objectively say these were the things in the plan we missed Revenue by 5% marketing missed by seven so let's go figure out how to make marketing work as (44:23) opposed to you missed your number it was a black box right Zero's fault now and I talk in the book a lot I actually have a a chapter about this marketing organization so it's the integration of sales and marketing uh which uh HubSpot coined probably in 2006 uh yeah through my career I've sometimes had sales and marketing both reporting to me as cro and sometimes I've just had the sales side and a strong CMO as a peer and then the bdrs or sdrs you know been on either side of that fund some time but regardless of reporting structure (44:56) collectively the marketing org has to agree on what the things are and then when it's not going well it's not about finger pointing it's just about can we diagnose the problem and what are we going to do about it you know maybe I don't have as many leads coming in and so I have to improve my win rate or maybe you say yeah your your team Talent is pretty bad and you're going to do a lot of turnover this year so marketing has to step up more than you know more than normal as long as we agree on what reality is and and what the result is (45:26) it's really helpful yeah you know you were talking about um metrics in this conversation earlier it reminds me of a story um I began at a company that recruited me as head of sales and told me that you've really got to fix the sales team you know we don't think that they're talented you're probably going to have to implement a sales Playbook or do skills training and really grow that the talent of the team now I also had marketing there um and when I got into the organization and we really started to look at all these (45:55) leading indicators we realized that actually the sales team was winning about 36% of all of their opportunities I think that's like worldclass win rate so I pretty quickly said you know I don't I don't think that this is really a sales Talent issue know what are the other components here and we started to look at pipeline coverage and you know although you know the marketing leader in the past had come to every board meeting and said I have hit the you know I have I have created more mqls ever than I than I ever have before uh the (46:28) conversion rate of mqls to sqls was really really low and so our sellers were looking at their sqls and their coverage for their pipeline was like 1.2 times their goal and so you know they had a really healthy win rate you know one out of three Deals they would have had to win 95% of the deals that became an SQL and so it really reoriented us because you know as piece of data that the executive team hadn't looked at the collective you know smarketing leadership team had never really looked at that mql L conversion rate and it (46:58) totally changed our thought about what's a strategy and what you know I was recruited to do was you know go build a sales Playbook make these sellers better quickly shifted to a strategy of how do we redefine what what is a real qualified opportunity who's the ICP how do we fix the mql SQL conversion rate and as soon as we did that the revenue numbers came yeah it's it's interesting why this is not more obvious like there's just a lack of data literacy in so many organizations um but it's it's endemic I had Kyle Lacy (47:35) on the Pod a couple weeks ago and he talks a lot about this he's like the CMO should never celebrate hitting their pipeline number if the sales team is missing their bookings number right like that that is part of your job you are signing up for the bookings number and that that productive tension needs to be there you know you you need to have have trust as a foundation so that you can have that product this is like lon's five dysfunctions but you need that trust built that you have a common objective and and we're in it (48:09) together in order to have productive conflict to to talk about the issues and problem solves then we can all collectively commit and be accountable and uh what's the top one in the pyramid uh and get results right right um and and often times that's missing but something that's not in the in the in that lenion uh five dysfunctions pyramid is is like common common language common data like is there a single source of Truth to tell us um to tell us what what reality is in the business which was clearly the case here well and I think (48:49) you know it's not because we're dumb and it's not because our organizations are terrible but it is because they're really Dynamic you know it is hard to get all the information together in one place and by the time you've done that the organization has moved on and so I think you know I worked with the leader who talks a lot about the ages and stages of a company and there's this really important shift that happens from startups where you know every employee in the company can all fit in one room and there's a lot of trust and kind of (49:18) communication back and forth and you know a group that can fit in a room can grow a company to about $20 million in revenue and then all of a sudden you know that has gotten to be such a size that I can no longer know every customer I can no longer resolve every issue um and I have to start specializing I have to start hiring other people to do the things that I do instinctively or the founder does instinctively and have it done at scale where 10 sellers 30 sellers 300 sellers all do it the same way um that's a really you know (49:50) difficult transition for people to make because as a human in the early startup the things that got me Awards and accolades were being the superhero who said I can do it all myself I made the cold call I did the demo they love me when the product was broken they called me and I fixed it um and that that was sort of a a feedback loop that said you know work in this fashion do more of that yeah and then all of a sudden you know your new context is do none of that you know delegate to someone else solve the problems that only you know how to (50:22) solve routinize standardize inspect inspect inspect and so you know and I LinkedIn I kind of have this tagline about leadership at the intersection of business and Humanity this the PHD in communication um but really realizing that the humanity part can get in the way of what the business part says is like of course it's obvious just look at the data and you know have a rational conversation yeah but tough to be rational when there's people's careers on the line and Prestige and Status where humans are funny funny animals in (50:57) that way when our status is uh questioned or under threat we can make incredibly irrational decisions or convince ourselves of a very odd interpretation of the world you see all the time I'm working with an organization right now um just started doing some Consulting with them uh that has suddenly gone through all of this growth and they have one seller who's been there for 17 years and you know she is she's a great seller she knows all the customers but she's also kind of benefited from this Legacy history that her territory is enormous (51:35) and all that you all the marketing all of this kind of stuff is working and all of a sudden we're going through this transition that says well wow now we've got 50 sellers here and so your territory is no longer the whole United States it's only this you know small sliver of you know your particular Town um and the first kind of human reaction is oh you're out to run my life you know how I'm the top performer here how are you going to the transition we had to make is really think about you know how do you serve the company and how does (52:05) your success help the company succeed and actually how do we change your compensation and your reward schema and everything else that you know you're exactly right you're not going to have your name on every single deal maybe you have a different quota now you know maybe you you have different kinds of things that you're going to be held accountable to that you can still make a lot of money you can still be a big leader um still have success but what success looks like is is a totally different kind of behavior than (52:31) what success looked like 10 years ago yeah tough kind of people issues to work through yeah and it's interesting going through these stages so I've I've been in two sort of hypergrowth environments and you know Reed Hoffman talks about this in Blitz scaling going from like a family to a tribe to a village to a city to a whatever else a globe yes yeah and and being able to understand how our role in those in those places changes and how we need to adapt and but then how this system works with uh within itself you (53:10) know the people talk about dunbar's number a lot you can only really have direct relationships with a certain number of people 150 for dunbar's number and so then how do you communicate and share information and keep people aligned when they can no longer do that on a onetoone basis okay well now your systems and structure have to drive alignment your uh culture and business process needs to deliver that outcome of Engagement and inspiration that maybe the CEO played on a on a one toone basis at some point it's it's very (53:45) challenging for folks to get through which is why I think is part of the reason why the the tenure of most cro is quite short because it's very difficult to if you're growing 2X year-over-year that business is so different every 12 to to 24 months and absolutely and I think our I think our colleagues in people operations or HR um you know they have a lot to to say in this realm as well I think one of the I tell this story in the book too in the chapter on recruiting I made a huge mistake early in my career I was at a I was at a (54:23) company that um it's kind of midsize Maybe maybe $50 million in Revenue um maybe a little bit less probably um but the I was recruiting a new role and a a manager in the company said here is this guy who you know came from Salesforce or Oracle or somewhere somewhere enormous um I've worked with him in the past he's always been a sales Club qualifier he's like 200% of quota he's a wonderful seller you should go recruit him here and you know our recruiting process and the recruiting process I wrote said you know what are we screening for are you a (55:02) tech seller have you done B2B Tech have you Ma your quota if so come on board and what we missed was all of the context about when you were at whatever that big company was you're this huge bdr team that created all of your leads for you at our company who you were right yeah at our company we didn't even have a bdr team yet so you were going to have to self Source like 80% of your stuff well now this this great talented guy comes on board and he doesn't want to do that or he hasn't done it in a long time he doesn't remember how to do (55:33) it and then you know our first couple of months of conversations in in one-on-one and coaching he starts telling me like you know the best deals I've ever had have been through you know Channel Partners who refer the business to us you know when you've got a trusted Channel partner that says you should go buy this product you know that's the best deal excellent we don't have Channel we don't we don't have a channel right you know you know another great thing that's always happened is when you can cross- sell new stuff into an existing install (55:59) base like those are easy sales great we're a one product company right now um and so you know six months later he he was leaving the organization and I felt like I failed I know he looked at it as you know this total blemish on his on his resume that you know as this huge top performer and then I had these six months that you know were just wasted I felt badly I wasted his time and I learned this huge lesson that you know you've got to start by thinking about what are the ual skills you know it's it's not just the results and the (56:30) metrics but what are the skills in the context to succeed here and how do you write those into the job description so that you're you know you're being really candid up front like I want great top performers who are also really comfortable with self sourcing who are comfortable we're an underdog environment we're the product that no one has heard of before and there's a much bigger player in the space that You' got to be Scrappy in over come and there are people who have those skills too that you'll you know eventually (56:55) found a great seller that that at that profile but it wasn't the fault of the sellers that we hired it was the fault to me as a manager for not screening for the right kinds of sucess metrics yeah I I do this in our job descriptions and when I post rolles on LinkedIn I talk about like this is what you need to know about selling it owner we sell it to Blue Collar it's 90% phone it's highly transactional blah blah and then we go I go through the whole thing because I'm trying at the very top of the funnel to allow people to self- select out they're (57:26) like oh I'm gonna be on the phone 90% of the time nobody's goingon to respond to my emails like but I'm really good at emails okay well then there's there's a better place for you and it's been interesting a few people have now borrowed this template um and uh are using it for their own own hiring which I love because I'm trying to bring more transparency into what I do and I'm strongly advocating that people are are highly transparent because it's it doesn't serve you to convince somebody to come work for you that's not going to be a (57:58) good fit that's right in my interview process I'm the final step for like rep hiring for example like a final check and in every one of those interviews you I I say hey look you know you probably heard all of this awesome stuff about owner and you know we got the best product and all these awesome people and I'm sure you're really excited but here's the thing you got to know that's like not for everybody and I and I make sure to hammer into them really what they what they need to understand about the environment that's going to turn (58:26) people off hey like we're really competitive every other person was a president's Club performer at their previous thing and now they're all here so you're you're probably not going to like Waltz to the top of the leaderboard and there's a lot of competitive pressure and we're pretty intense environment like we expect a high a high work rate we do not miss like we are a we are a don't miss culture and and people you can see other you can see people's eyes light up sometimes they're so excited to just be around other dogs (58:59) like that they like want to be around in that in that world and some people you can see them sort of like react like that sounds way too intense like I don't want to sign up for this and uh the transparency is just so so critical and you can have a successful career in any of these environments you know a lot of times um I've been through a lot of mergers and Acquisitions and a lot of times I find myself talking to sellers about you know you have been the performer in a in a small company that you know you're $30 million in revenue (59:31) and you know you personally you have a personal relationship with the CEO and everybody knows your name and you're a huge voice and now you're going to go get acquired by this company that's $300 million in Revenue right the CEO is not going to know you personally you're not going to be the biggest voice in the company um now there's other good things that come with that but it's going to be a very different experience than what you're in today and there is no shame or nothing wrong with saying I've been grateful for my journey so far (59:59) I love this journey and I don't want to continue on that ship I actually want to go start over and do another startup and come back and there are some people that make that transition really really well and that's good too you know I know that I am never going to be the cro of sales fors with some big you know billion billion dollar Revenue companies I'm really really good at 100 million 300 million kind of sized companies um it's going to be a lot of Brands you've never heard of before that's so okay it's it's (1:00:27) work that I love um and there's there's no shame in not wanting to do whatever the rest of the world might thinks like the next big progression looks like yeah Ryan holiday writes a lot about this accepting hard truths about the world because you know we can't wish the world was somehow different than it is we have to accept reality and then make decisions from this reality um and he talks about you know there's some things that are immovable and you know like pain and suffering comes from wishing that immovable things can be (1:01:04) moved and and you see this all the time it's like oh well this should should be this way or that should be that way like well it's not it's not anymore we got bot we're $500 million company now so that's awesome and let's celebrate the past for what it was because it was amazing we can mourn and be sad about it and now we need to move on to the next thing which is going to be exciting and celebrated in a different way yeah um I want to get into reporting and inspecting before we run out of time here so yeah absolutely I loved that (1:01:37) quote inspect what you expect and you mentioned sort of cadences between repid manager manager c c board so how do how do you think about building the right Cadence because this can look different for different stages but like what are the core principles of of building the right reporting and inspection framework yeah and I you think this is going to be another maybe distinction between Venture and PE or startup and kind of midsize company that I've worked on I do really well with a revenue Ops person or maybe a revops team that can really (1:02:11) manage lots of data for me and I like to get out a weekly flash report I call it that looks at all of those leading indicators of what we laid out at the beginning of the year so imagine a have a chart in the book obviously you can download it but um imagine sort of a look at your quarter that says the you know across the horizontal axis is every week week one week two week three week four so what's the revenue Target we're trying to hit at the end of this quarter what did we sell in week one what did we sell in week two how did that kind of (1:02:42) grow up cumulatively how does that map against a similar line of what did we predict for the year and then what does that looks like this quarter last year the most immediately preceding quarter so that we all kind of know on a new logo are we on track or aren't we you know there are a lot of businesses that um you know close all of their close all of their revenue the last week of the month or last week of the quarter and I think we can correct some of that um but there's also some cyclicality that that's just the way the world works if (1:03:13) you're a cro who can see data that says here's the shape of what we're expecting and we always expect it and here's what last quarter and last year you know always showed it you're a lot less nervous when you've got week one week two week three we haven't sold anything than if you don't have any data and you're just promising we're going get there especially when you can view that same chart by pipe pipe moved pipe created to to understand the inputs exactly right and so also same kind of flash reports on you know renewal data (1:03:44) um we set a plan that said these are the customers that were going to come up for Renewal this month and we set a plan that said you know maybe one of them is going to turn but the rest of them aren't and they're all going to take 3% price increase or you know whatever that is how does re how is reality matching up to have we received renewals on time have we received the price increases on time etc etc and you know again every element on that annual plan new product sales like did the product come to Market how long did we think it was (1:04:16) going to take to get the first one the second one the fifth one were we G to give it away you know all of that stuff um and so I had I I find myself often with a really strong rev op team who can make all of this you know kind of happen automatically um that usually it's a Wednesday for me you know all of this you know and it's really only like four slides of data um these four slides all come out that I see it all of my sales managers see it the rest of the C team sees it and at least some portion of the board sees it um so that then we can (1:04:47) have a conversation not about forecast the weather and is it going to rain or not but we can have a conversation about it is raining what size are we going to you know how long are we going to stay in the house um and so it just raises the level of conversation and makes us all better and then how does that Cascade into your like team meeting and one-on-one Cadence is is that Wednesday flash then like discuss in your meetings or are people pulling stuff out of it like how does this tie into the meeting Cadence oh great question yeah so it's (1:05:19) actually the culmination of it so I it's um you know early in the week I start with my one-on ones at a at a seller level um you know let's look at your pipeline what deals and I I talk about forecasting with a couple of different numbers you know is every deal has you know some stage in the CRM system it has some close date and it has some dollar amount now are you committing that deal on that date and that dollar is it a best case for you or is it just in pipeline you know you're going to lose it or you don't think you're going to (1:05:50) win it and how does that get rolled up to managers who then have a a meeting with the cro on you know the manager forecast what are we committing what's our best case and then you know we ultimately forecast something in the middle there you that the commit number is you know a very conservative just like we talked about with annual planning yeah like you know because you can actually name the deal the best case is the upper limit of the best you possibly could do if every Star aligned and we had perfect execution and reality (1:06:17) is going to lie somewhere in the middle and so you know we forecast with that in mind and then we have that sort of discussion and then when the flash report comes out you know it summarizes you know here's our here's our forecast here's our performance and are we ahead or are we behind then lets us have meetings on Thursday and Friday on a strategic level about you know three weeks in a row we're really not getting the new business or we're really not getting the mql SQL conversions now let's have our leadership team and the (1:06:46) best Minds come together about you know what can we try differently um to get a different outcome and I think a lot of organizations spend their time chasing their tail just trying to you know as you said earlier like you've got to have you've got to have data literacy and you've got to be ready there a lot of organizations spend so much time trying to find the number of what was closed what wasn't closed what did the rep say is committed or not that they never get to have the discussion about what do we do about it um you know if you have a (1:07:14) good process you have a good team increasingly a lot of Technology you know I'm a huge fan of Clary and their AI stuff um you know that the better you can get on having tools and processes that bring you the data immediately then opens up the rest of your week to have discussions about so now what you would do about what we see yeah I just did a webinar before we hopped on with superhuman the VP sales Andrew Johnson and Kevin dorsy and this is like one of the things that I hammered on and on about is you can't fix your business (1:07:44) unless you know what's happening and so it's it's it you have to nail the instrumentation and the discipline to teach people to use the same things in Salesforce the same way and it's rolled up on the same Cadence and there there's a level of of rigor and and operational excellence that's needed as an input or else you're really just guessing and so like for us we run a monthly MBR where we do a lot of this like deeper inspection and problem solving and we have a grid of every segment across one axis and then every uh Sal stage from (1:08:26) top of funnel all the way through to handoff and uh and la and successful customer launch and you know we have targets for every single one of those squares and we can see red yellow green and and we know that the reps are doing things in a consistent enough way and there there's very clear instructions in Guru and notion of how we want things to be done so that we can rely on that information to to make great decisions uh and then track it week over week over week because otherwise you're cooked like you don't don't even don't (1:09:01) even spend time trying to problem solve until you can have your Baseline of confidence in the inputs that are going into your Salesforce and how it's getting used and and the the Integrity of your data just fix that first before before anything else and have I mean this comes this comes with overhead and cost you know having an Ops Team it's people it's it's spend there's technology and so you know this may be also why I talk about my space like the private Equity company in you know a certain Revenue range you I go talk to (1:09:37) Founders in Chicago we've got this incubator 1871 which blows my mind you know little three-person company founders with an idea there's no way they could afford to have that rigor in their business yet because they're they're just trying to make payroll um so you have to do something different there um and I suspect there are VC experts who can tell you all the you know the best tips and tricks for that to but in my Niche it works really well and then let's extend this out because you know we talked about HR issues this (1:10:03) also if it's if it's working really well becomes a coaching Cadence for your sellers and every member of the team where I like to begin every quarter having some sort of a performance plan now I know that word performance Improvement plan has a bad route you know usually it means like it's a shortcut for I'm going to fire you in in 90 days and you know legal wants me to cover it I think every seller should have a performance Improvement plan it's not about firing you it's about saying let's begin the quarter with a conversation and look (1:10:34) back what went well what didn't go well of course really easy did you make your number or didn't you make your number but then look through that whole win creation waterfall if you didn't make your number why didn't you were you not you're not winning enough are you're not converting enough you're not putting enough leads in whatever that is so now let's talk about our plan for the next 90 days that's just going to improve the performance in your territory what are the things that we need to put more Focus or put more effort on or more (1:11:02) investment behind or whatever maybe you need to prospect more maybe you've got more than enough pipeline you just got to work on negotiation and close and let's come up with that development plan that 90 days from now we can come back and look and say you know yes did you make your number or not did you develop that new skill and what's the next skill that we need to refine because we all constantly need to improve and get better and so it's not about you know you're in trouble or I'm bringing HR in or you're going to you (1:11:29) know get fired it's literally how do I improve your performance so that we all you know our boat collectively Rises yeah we do the same thing we've got a monthly report card that the managers and the Reps work on collectively and they they select together what we call Secret Sauce like this is the my the secret sauce I'm working on this month we sell it at restaurants it's essentially the number number one skill that will move the needle on your your on your results and so they and and we try to make this like rep driven the the (1:12:01) rep explores their data and decides what they want to work on and if they're way off the manager can of course correct but that is unless you have that coaching plan in place then then it's it's too hard to get better every every month um okay I want to move to a quick fire okay before we wrap up so um first question what do you think separates a good cro from a great one one that like exceptionally drives results above what the market might freely give so I think a great cro you know all C are probably inspirational people that teams want to (1:12:39) follow I think the great ones recognize it's not about them it's not about putting them in the spotlight it's putting their sellers in the spotlight and showing their sellers how their day-to-day activity connects to Company Success so being able to have that whole ladder that I didn't just give you a 20% quote increase because I'm a mean guy but really showing them that like strategically here's are the companies trying to go you know we're we're looking at this growth rate we're going to get there because of know the new (1:13:09) product or the new marketing or whatever and your piece in the Cog is this um and so the better I think the best leaders can help Frontline reps understand a direct connection between everything in their life and the company's bigger picture um and and it also inspires of that the company succeeds because I as a rup succeed in these ways yeah all of the data would back that the all of the data on employee engagement would show that this is one of the single biggest needle movers is help people find a sense of purpose and connection to the (1:13:42) mission so that's a good one um what's the advice you find yourself most frequently giving to other leaders you know people in the portfolio C that are figuring this out yeah so I'm constantly telling folks to build the plan and measure the plan um and I think the biggest piece of advice is also recency and firsthand experience is not data so you know you see it with sellers or you see it with you know a leader who's gone out on a sales call recently and the one customer they heard this week said your price is too high or you know named some (1:14:18) competitor and say I like this competitor better and all of a sudden you know they're operating saying the whole Market believes our price is too high we're way too expensive yeah you've got to drive back in the data and say you know of the 400 sales calls we've been on we heard that competitor's name twice you happen to be in the room for one of them so it feels this big to you set your emotion aside set your recency aside grounded in the data and what's the fact that you can actually prove and and then you won't swing the business (1:14:46) too far in One Direction or the other without reason great what's the hardest lesson you've had to learn as a leader uh humility owning mistakes and and being really transparent about when I've got it wrong um it is easy to get in a hero complex that you know it all rides on me and everyone's looking at me and it can be hard to to own your failures along the way um you know again this kind of business and Humanity thing like the human always wants to brush it under the rug um bad news doesn't get better over time and so it's been really hard (1:15:25) but it's been a really good lesson for me that the earlier I can admit I was wrong I made a mistake I don't know what we're doing I need help it's always been better for me to get that that stuff out earlier that was also a hard one for me to learn yeah absolutely um last question what's the best thing you've read in the last 12 months you can't say your own book but of that at the end um let me have a pause on that for a second okay ask me the question again what's the best thing you've read in the last 12 months uh so I've been talking to a (1:16:06) CEO of SBI uh sales Benchmark index uh and he introduced me this book called halim which is really about um or it's something about halim it's about finding purpose in the second half of your life and so you know the idea is that you've gotten to some level at the age you know that I am right now is maybe late 40s early 50s and you're halfway through your life um and how do you think about how you're going to make the best use of the next half of it um is it going to be continued business success is it going (1:16:40) to be something philanthropic um it might be a shift in Direction but are you going to bring the same rigor and Excellence that you brought to the first half of your life to the second I love that I'm I'm not too far behind on that halfway point so I might have to pick this up soon uh this is great so I mean I've got tons of cool takeaways here I think you've really hammered home the need for rigor in planning and inspection of the plan and having the data to go back to it I think that's a a really good message for folks to take away (1:17:14) especially as we get into the new year as people are executing on their plan what is their Rhythm to revisit uh what is their Rhythm to revisit how are you performing the things that you architected in your growth plan that that's a really uh useful takeaway so how can people find you where where can they follow your writing your content and uh maybe tell people a little bit more about the book sure best place for me is on my website JD Miller phd. (1:17:42) com you'll have links to the book which you'll also find on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and all the great bookstores uh you'll also find me on kind of every social media as JD Miller PhD so you'll find that on LinkedIn Twitter Facebook and so on very cool uh well this was awesome and the book comes out January 14th but you can pre-order it now pre-order it today it'll be on your doorstep first thing in the morning on the 14th there you go uh I think folks are going to listen to this and be pretty compelled to listen because I I I (1:18:11) took a ton away from this conversation JD this was these were really helpful Frameworks so uh I'm excited we could do it and thanks for coming on I appreciate it thanks for having me [Music] thank you for listening to the revenue leadership podcast if you enjoyed it don't forget to subscribe and you can find a link in the show notes and be sure to leave a five-star review share it with your network and please join me next Wednesday for another great conversation