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The Growth Wizards Podcast is the playbook for B2B GTM leaders who want smarter, repeatable ways to generate demand and build pipeline. Each episode breaks down how CEOs, CROs, and marketing execs drive growth — from top-of-funnel tactics and AI to thought leadership that converts.
Growth Wizards - Michael Deleonardis
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[00:00:00]
Tanner Green: We are so excited to have another guest at the "Growth Wizards" podcast. Michael, thanks for coming on the show. Let's have a quick intro from you. Tell us what- a-about yourself. We're excited ~to,~ to jump right in.
Michael Deleonardis: Awesome, and I appreciate the invite, Tanner. A little introduction myself, Mike Deleonardis. I am the Chief Revenue Officer for Verity. I run global sales, marketing, client success, and partnerships. My background is thirty years in enterprise technology, primarily on the digital side of things, both software as a service ~and~ and through professional services.
This is my first foray into that intersection of the digital and physical world which has been ~a,~ a welcome change for me from a career standpoint. Got me very excited about the opportunity of trying to start to explore different challenges and go-to-markets with new technologies, specifically in a physically constr-constrained world being robotics
Tanner Green: Yeah. That's amazing. Were you in software as a service, like back in the day at the beginning when it first became
Michael Deleonardis: [00:01:00] I was there at the very, very beginning. Actually, one, I did a sales call at Salesforce when they were... It was 2002, and they were a team of about 25 to 50 folks in a single room just getting the thing off the ground. Yeah, I've been there ~since~ since day one
Tanner Green: Man, can you, like, how, just real quick, how does that feel to see Salesforce back then in 2002 to where it is now? Like, That's crazy,
Michael Deleonardis: I think it's less about seeing what Salesforce has evolved into. It's more about the impact they've had on the overall global software as a service market, right? And I think the thing that folks underestimate or undervalue is how they made an ecosystem core to your growth trajectory.
And then you look at every other enterprise software as a service company, whether they're in sales performance management, they're in healthcare, they're in finance, they're in HR, they have all followed suit. Everyone has tried to build ecosystems, large scale ecosystems to essentially scale and [00:02:00] grow, and they were the ones that pioneered that with the force.com platform
Tanner Green: Yeah. Yeah. That's fascinating. I love that. Cool. I love the background. I'm excited to have the conversation, Michael. Let's dive into ~the f-~ the piece of news that I thought might be interesting. And we all know that AI, everyone, ~y-~ the biggest worry was AI's gonna take your job, you're gonna get fired, whatever.
It's happened a few times, and then it's been backfired a couple of times, and it's worked in other spots. But one of the things that I saw this article that came out on News Channel and it says that AI is reshaping GTM careers, especially at the entry level. So
Your SDRs, your entry level marketing, those types of roles.
And so ~what,~ what impact does this have on the GTM space and where do you see this continuing forward, and then where do you see it stopping at a certain point?
Michael Deleonardis: So I'll start with a little bit of context. [00:03:00] My prior role before I was at Verity, I ran global sales and marketing for a company called Ashley Partners. We focused a hundred percent in the automation space, so we were delivering technology, use cases, and programs around AI, machine learning, document understanding, robotic process automation, OCR.
So a broad platform of capabilities. And where we saw the highest growth, and more importantly, the highest value returned to our clients, was in automations that was human, true human in the loop, where the automation, whether that was agentic, that was AI, that was machine learning, whatever it may be, was complementing that human being's work, enhancing the output of that individual and creating consistency in that output across lar-large scale teams.
Think contact centers, think SDRs, whatever it may be. So where do I see the value in go-to-market? It's human in the loop. How do you enhance and improve the value of what that individual is able to deliver? One of the best ways I see that [00:04:00] happening within my own team is the ability to do deep research, broad, deep research on individual prospects and individuals within personas within the account to be able to show up better prepared, right?
There's a woman out in ~the,~ the sales performance management space that is that uses this term of show me you know me, right? And as a seller, if you show up and show that you understand and you know the individual, you know their business, you're creating credibility. That credibility allows you to then kinda translate that lead into real pipeline versus showing up trying to schlep capabilities, products, use cases when you haven't understood the individual's problem, right?
And that's a bit presumptive. So to me, that's how I see AI changing the go-to-market. It's allowing us to show up and show a prospect that we know how to... That we know them. Secondly, it's enabling us to drive ~what,~ what is called buying process as a service, essentially being able to deliver the right [00:05:00] deliverables, the right information to your buyer at the right time so they're making the best decision for their organization.
And sometimes that decision is not to go with you. But when you show up with that mindset of buying process as a service, you become invaluable to your buyer versus something that is seen as highly transactional as I'm just showing up to get the minimum amount of information from you, so that way then I can go back and evaluate your technology and make a decision.
You become part of the process rather than an input to the process.
Tanner Green: Did you coin that term? Buying...
Michael Deleonardis: buying process as a service. No, I didn't. A company by the name of Aligned that delivers digital sales rooms that we actually used coined it~ as~ as buying process as service, and now it's something that I've adopted along with their technology that I've integrated into my process. I've always had a deliverable centric sales process.
I believe strongly that if you show up and you're producing outputs for your buyer throughout the journey, you're giving them an [00:06:00] indication of what it looks like when they're gonna be a customer, right? If you show up and you're highly transactional, what you're showing them is, as a customer, they're also gonna be treated as very transactional.
And then that has now matured into things like buying process as a service that has ~a-~ that Aligned has brought to the market
Tanner Green: Yeah. I love that. I actually wanna jump in there and talk about what that looks like for you guys at Verity. I feel like that's a relatively newer thought pattern and very applicable because they have the big stat nowadays. It's like, what? 70% of the research is done before the buyer talks to the salesperson anyway, so they've got lots of data already.
So what does that look like at Verity? How do you guys implement that?
Michael Deleonardis: Yep. So what we're seeing as we've implemented it, we're actually getting direct feedback from prospects that they really appreciate that we go another layer deeper in how we engage and support. We provide an additional layer of information that allows them to make better decisions, and we're much more collaborative through the [00:07:00] process.
And what that looks like is at each phase gate in our sales process, we have specific deliverables. At the front end of the sales cycle, we have what we call our executive summary, our discovery executive summary, where essentially we're giving a one-pager back to our buyer that kind of summarizes the use cases, the pain that we understand, and where there may be some objective outcomes that we can start to have an impact on.
Now, that buyer has a one-pager they can share internally with their executive sponsor, with peers within the organization to then level set on. We understand the problem, we have use cases to support it, and we ~start--~ we're starting to understand what levers we can impact. We then transition into use case education, and we've developed a whole map of all the different capabilities that we can deliver.
The reason we've done that is for ninety percent of our buyers, they show up and they look at us as, "You're the guys with drones that count stuff." That's true, but that's only a portion of the value. [00:08:00] We actually have an impact for the entire put-to-pack process. What we're able to do is take the data that we're gathering through our solution and give it to put-away teams every single morning, and they're able to reduce put-away errors or time to resolve those errors from six months to twenty-four to forty-eight hours.
But you've got to educate clients that ~you're,~ that you can support that. So we go through use case education that is for-fully documented. Then we do a collaborative value engineering exercise, and the output there is a value story. At the end of it, we are able to give them a very detailed mapping of our use cases to KPIs, to direct benefits that are gonna hit their P&L, and to indirect benefits that help support that buying cycle and the justification to buy it.
And now all of a sudden, we're going from ROIs that are one point two, one point five x over three years to ten to fifteen x over a three-year ~p-~ year period, right?
Tanner Green: that's crazy
Michael Deleonardis: Yeah. Yeah when you start to expand the purview beyond you're the guys with drones that count stuff, and you start to show what's [00:09:00] the impact on continuous verification of all of the movements across your warehouse floor, that has downstream impact.
We're starting to recover goods that would've been in a write-off stage. We had one client, $400,000 in write-offs we prevented in the first 90 days. We're able to improve on time and full order fulfillment, or in the reverse, canceled orders due to lost goods. Within 90 days with one client, we were able to reduce that by 1%.
At high volume, that is meaningful revenue for that client. So again, it's just opening up the purview and educating the client on the impact your solution can have outside of what it was purpose-built to do that was essentially monitor all of the movements across the warehouse floor, and specifically in our case, inventory
Tanner Green: Wow. I love that. That's amazing. And so when you're showing somebody in this go-to-market space ~they're,~ as they are approaching their buying process and what types of people are these? Are they, on the C-suite level of a specific warehouse or like warehousing [00:10:00] company, or what types of people are you looking for?
Michael Deleonardis: So what we're seeing is our buying committee expand because of the fact that we're showing up. And what I like to say is, sound like the people you wanna be in front of, right? If you sound like the people that are at the lowest level in the organization, that's where you're gonna be stuck at. If you sound like the people that are two layers above them, you're giving them the confidence to put you in front of them, right?
And it really comes down to confidence, and I'm sure you've been sold to before, and somebody shows up and they don't exude a whole lot of confidence, and you look at it and go, "There's no way I'm putting you in front of my boss," right? So with buying process as a service, what we're able to do is improve our credibility, and we're then expanding our exposure.
To directly answer your question, more often than not, what ~we're,~ where we're selling is a kind of that VP of operations level. An individual that may have 10, 15, 20, 30 warehouses within their portfolio, and then we're selling in those individual warehouses where you've got heads [00:11:00] of operations and fulfillment, heads of inventory management, the overall site leaders and site managers that we're also selling to that are part of the process
Tanner Green: Interesting. So then when you're talking to some of these people and they're looking up, "Hey, how do we improve our bottom line?" When we're trying to-- when we've got so many warehouses, so many things, that's where you start to educate and say, "Hey, here's where it's not just counting stuff.
This is how it actually affects your bottom line," and comes in, really strong as a value prop for those people. I love it.
Michael Deleonardis: Yeah, ~I had~ I had a CEO that taught me ~this,~ this concept of blue dollars versus green dollars, right? Green dollars are those that hit the bottom line. They hit the income statement or the balance sheet in some way, shape, or form. And if you can consistently build business cases off of green dollars, you're gonna consistently get approved, 'cause in some way, shape, or form, finance is gonna show up.
And if it isn't green dollars, they're not interested in it 'cause it's not hitting the income statement or the balance sheet. And then you've got your blue dollars that tend to be more soft benefits. The most [00:12:00] common one you run into in automation is hours back to the business. I've saved you 10,000 hours, but the reality is, those hours end up getting pushed elsewhere into the organization.
It's not actually a saving in any way, shape, or form. It's an operational efficiency, 'cause you're taking hours from someplace that is highly transactional, and maybe you're redistributing those hours to something more valuable. But it's not having an impact on the bottom line in any way, shape, or form.
And in today's market, in today's day and age, if you're not consistently building business cases based off of green dollar benefits, you're gonna struggle ~to,~ to get it approved and get it through the finance committee and get it signed
Tanner Green: I really like that thought. And especially it might even be more expensive for some people because they take those lower level, different tasks and actions and whatnot, and then they distribute that to higher level stuff, and then they end up needing to hire somebody way more expensive than some of those lower level jobs.
I've seen that done before for sure. So
Michael Deleonardis: Yeah, [00:13:00] absolutely
Tanner Green: When you're talking about Verity and what your plan is with your team and where you're planning on going, ~what~ what sort of stage are you guys in as far as development, and where are you looking to take it in the future?
Michael Deleonardis: I believe pretty strongly that you've got to adapt your go-to market and adapt your business to where your clients are going and where the market's going, right? And what we're seeing in the warehouse and within supply chains is this heavy demand to shift from human-dependent orchestration to intelligent orchestration.
In a nutshell, most warehouses and most supply chains have hit the ceiling of what you can actually achieve with human beings and human labor alone, right? You then layer in the fact that since COVID, you've seen, a five to 10X increase in SKU counts, right? It's just ~get-~ gotten a lot more complex, a lot more diverse.
Essentially, the movement of ~go-~ goods isn't as straightforward as it used to be. Carrying costs for inventory have increased 20 to 30%, [00:14:00] and that's only gonna put more and more pressure on human labor. So really, where we're going as a business and where I'm taking our go-to market is helping our clients go through that transition, that shift from human-dependent orchestration to intelligent orchestration, leveraging capabilities like ~art-~ artificial intelligence and machine learning to get them there.
And this is a major shift because for the better part of the last 20 years, robotic automation was really geared towards one thing, reduction of labor. ~Re-~ replacing human beings with robotic solutions where the work was ~heav-~ highly dangerous highly repeatable, or it was low-cost work that you couldn't justify really putting a human being around.
And again, essentially the warehouse has hit a ceiling in its operational capabilities to take advantage of that approach, and you're seeing the shift to this intelligent orchestration mindset
Tanner Green: And so when somebody's moving to this intelligent ~orchestrat-~ orchestration mindset, what are-- besides some of the [00:15:00] things you're doing at Verity, I'm curious to know what are some of the things that you look at and you talk about? 'Cause this is a totally new space for me, so I'm curious to know, what does that shift look like?
Michael Deleonardis: So it's less about what the physical AI or robot does, and it's more about the data that robot is capturing, and then how do I ingest that data and make it part of a larger supply chain data set that then I can get a better idea of where are my risks, where are my bottlenecks, how do I make better decisions around, for example, working capital, right?
Inventory is one of the biggest strains on working capital. For some retailers, manufacturers, it takes up eighty, ninety percent of your working capital. And as supply chains have got more and more complex, a larger portion of that is being consumed by safety stock, right? Essentially your hedge, right?
When you start to get a better level of transparency through data, you can then make better decisions around working capital and reduce the portion of that is getting [00:16:00] consumed by inventory because you're confident in the inventory you have is gonna meet the demand in the marketplace, and you're gonna be able to get those goods in the hands of your clients when they need it and when they expect it based on the SLAs you've delivered.
Tanner Green: Oh, okay.
Michael Deleonardis: that answers the question.
Tanner Green: yeah. So just to summarize, ~it's m- it's less of,~ it's less of keeping, improving on processes. It's more of, hey, there's inputs and there's outputs, and then there's sort of a black box in between that becomes difficult to see with the human eye because there's so much data and so much things going on with all the robots.
Used to be able to tell bottlenecks because you're looking at it and you're saying, "That thing is going slow." Or
Michael Deleonardis: You're seeing things stack up at inbound at the front end, right? Because either you've got too much inventory in the warehouse and you don't have the capacity to put it away, or so much is coming in, you don't have the labor to put it away, and it's just starting to stack up, is just an example of that, right?
And this kinda goes back to my point ~on on on, on human,~ human-in-the-loop automation, because essentially what I'm saying is you're relying less on [00:17:00] what the robot does, and you're relying more on the data it's gathering, and then it's a human being that's involved in making those decisions, right?
We use machine learning and AI to help enhance the intelligence we're getting out of that data, but the humans still need to make the decision on what they do in the supply chain. Do I reduce safety stock in a certain area tied to a certain warehouse, right? Do I throw more labor at a certain problem because I'm gonna see ~cert-~ at certain peaks tied to the cyclical nature of my market?
But better information and better data allows you to make sounder decisions, but those decisions are still human-led
Tanner Green: Nice. Love that. Michael there's a couple parts where we're getting close to on time right now. There's a couple parts of this that I wanted to get your thoughts on ~f-~ as far as where you wanna take Verity and where your team is aiming to go in the go-to-market space.
Because As you grow, there's lots of different approaches you can take as far as more marketing spend and more account-based spend. You can do a lot of different [00:18:00] directions. What does that look like for you and your team?
Michael Deleonardis: ~It's all,~ it's across the board. I'm building a demand gen engine as we speak which, is going to cross multiple mediums, multiple capabilities. So we'll be doing syndicated content, we'll be doing paid ads on LinkedIn, we'll be doing traditional digital outreach via email. All of that was gonna be complemented by a content strategy that is very much anchored around thought leadership.
But really the main difference in my go-to-market strategy is tied to my client success organizations. ~M-~ most client success ~organ-~ organizations are post-sales, right? So they're the consumer of whatever was sold in some way, shape, or form. And the problem with those sorts of handoffs where you've got a sales team that is pre-sales, you've got a post-sales team that is client success, is the client loses out because that handoff a lot of times gets broken.
And for many people that have been in customer success, client success long enough, they've all had this conversation of, [00:19:00] "I can't speak to what your salesperson told you. I can only tell you what the product does today and what's in your contract," right? And that is a very difficult conversation to have when there isn't continuity between the sales cycle or the buying cycle post-sales.
So what I've done is I've created a client success org that is both pre-sales and post-sales. On the pre-sales side of it, they do a lot of our technical solutioning, they do sizing, they do demonstrations, and they own value engineering. They're the ones building the business cases. And then post-sale, their responsibility is carry that business case forward into value realization for the client, and that value realization may come through taking advantage of capabilities via adoption.
It may be through helping them better understand how they can take advantage of the technology that we have sold them in some way, shape, or form. But that is that continuity point that gives the client confidence that what I sold them is what they're going to get because I've created a team that ensures that continuity
Tanner Green: Love that. Michael, thanks a bunch for coming on the show. [00:20:00] It's been a ton of fun. Where can people go find you and connect with you?
Michael Deleonardis: I'm on LinkedIn, so you can find me there. So feel free to reach out. It's Michael Deleonardis, or you can just search Verity, you can find me there as well. But LinkedIn is the best way to reach out to me
Tanner Green: Awesome. Cool. Michael, thanks so much for coming on the show, and thanks for the listeners for tuning in
Michael Deleonardis: My pleasure, Tanner. Thank you for the invite