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Are you a CRO looking for insights and ideas from your peers?
Are you a Revenue Leader with aspirations to become a Chief Revenue Officer?
Are you a CEO looking to appoint a CRO to scale your business?
Welcome to the CRO Spotlight podcast, a weekly show featuring insights from Chief Revenue Officers, B2B Revenue Leaders, and CEOs.
Hosted by Warren Zenna, Founder and CEO of The CRO Collective, the show goes deep behind the scenes with the people who have been there, done that, and have seen the results.
The CRO Spotlight Podcast is an open, free-form conversation that digs into real issues that Revenue Leaders and CROs grapple with everyday.
Hi. I'm Warren Zena, founder and CEO of the CRO Collective, and welcome to the CRO spotlight podcast. This show is focused exclusively on the success of chief revenue officers. Each week, we have an open frank and free form conversation with top experts in the revenue space about the CRO role and its critical impact on businesses. This podcast is the place to be for CROs, sales and marketing leaders who aspire to become CROs and founders who are looking to appoint a CRO or wanna support their CRO to succeed.
Warren Zenna:Thanks for listening. Now let's go mix it up. Welcome to this episode of the CRO spotlight podcast. This is Warren Zen. I'm the founder of the CRO Collective.
Warren Zenna:And today, I'm really excited to welcome Amy Osmond Cook, who's the co founder of Fullcast. Amy and I met because they acquired a company called EBSA, which is now Fullcast Revenue Insights. And as some of you know, we work with EBSA as one of the delivery platforms for the CRO readiness program. And now they're part of this amazing company. And then I met Amy, and she was amazing.
Warren Zenna:And we kept talking, and now we're doing some stuff together. And I said, Amy, you gotta come on the show and talk to my my listeners because it's a it's a really, really cool story. So welcome, Amy, and thanks so much for being here.
Amy Cook:Thank you so much for having me, Warren. What a pleasure.
Warren Zenna:Thank you. And and, you know, you have a really cool story for your company. I want I want everybody to sort of know a bit more about you. So, like, how did you, you know, get into this sort of go to market space in the first place and, you know, and then a little bit more about the evolution to Fullcast and its inception and now the whole thing. I'd to hear that story, please.
Amy Cook:For sure. Yeah. Love it.
Warren Zenna:Good. I'm I'm I'm asking.
Amy Cook:Oh, you're rolling. Oh, okay. Boom.
Warren Zenna:Yeah. Boom. Yeah.
Amy Cook:Well, so I got into business kind of backwards, honestly. Like, I was, I had four kids, and my husband got a job with Lehman Brothers. And we thought that we were all set. And, he got a job with Lehman Brothers, and then one month later, they went bankrupt.
Warren Zenna:Bankrupt. Oh, man.
Amy Cook:And so yeah. So we were like, oh my gosh. What are we gonna do? And we couldn't move. I had been married before, and we had a situation with my ex where we couldn't move.
Amy Cook:And so I was like, well, kids have gotta eat. It's time to time to get moving. And so my husband, Jeff, who is super fun and cool and still had a sense of humor, said, hey, Amy. I've got $10,000, and we got it from our tax return. Let's split it in half, and let's see who can make the most money.
Amy Cook:And I said, okay. Can can I start a business? And he's like, do whatever you want. I'm gonna put mine in real estate. I said, alright.
Amy Cook:You're on. And so the first thing was my dad, was Wayne Osmond. He needed some swag for his shows, and he's like, I've never done anything just for me before. It's always been one of the brothers. And I had been trained as an academic editor.
Amy Cook:And so I was that was one of my first jobs before I had kids. And I said, oh my gosh. I totally know how to do this. So let's put together a book for you. And that was my first project.
Amy Cook:And ever since then, you know, people would say, okay. Well, you can write, but can you re can you edit? Can you design? Can you do web? And I couldn't do any of those things.
Amy Cook:And so I had to hire people to help me. And so, I started a business called Stage Marketing, and, and it grew organically for fifteen years. And it was just the most compelling, wonderful experience for me as a business person. And I had a client, and his name was Ryan Westwood. And I was doing some, like, ghost writing for him for his Forbes column.
Warren Zenna:Mhmm.
Amy Cook:And he said, you know, Amy, I'm looking for a head of marketing. And I said, let me put my business on ice and come and work for you. Because I had so much to learn about going to market, how to work with businesses, how to do depart departmental stuff. And so, you know, I basically left my business kinda on autopilot. We had some really good clients and and things that didn't need my help.
Amy Cook:My team could do it. And then I would dove headfirst into Simplus, and they were a Salesforce partner. And really my first experience with revenue operations, I was the chief marketing officer there, and we grew that from series A through acquisition to Infosys. So then it was 2020, and I had the opportunity to come on board with an early AI digital healthcare company called Pathology Watch. And it was AI research only, but it was a really fun digitizing opportunity.
Amy Cook:So we would take skin cancer slides, and we would digitize them, and we would send them out. And, you know, we increased their turnaround time, and we were able to, you know, really create equitable health care for people who could detect cancer earlier. So that was We took that from series a through acquisition to Sonic Healthcare in 2023. I did it one more time with Onboard 2023 to 2024, and then I sold my business and to Amplio. And Ryan called me and was like, hey.
Amy Cook:I wanna do this again. Let's let's get let's get the team back together. We wanna go into the go to market tech space. And it took me, like, one second to say, absolutely. Let's do this.
Amy Cook:You know? This is the perfect time. It's the perfect opportunity. There's so much change that's happening right now. It's a scary time to be in go to market tech, but also such an exciting time.
Amy Cook:And so that's kind of the how my story came to be and why I'm in go to market.
Warren Zenna:Gotcha. It's really cool. So now that was the company that you guys started. Is that was it called Fullcast?
Amy Cook:Fullcast is the company that so Ryan and Isaac Westwood, his brother, Lance Evanston, I, we raised $34,000,000, and we purchased Fullcast as part of
Warren Zenna:I see. Okay.
Amy Cook:The the seed round. So Fullcast was in existence. It was started by a Darmesh Singh and Balabala Bhaskaran. And Balas stayed on and became our chief technology officer, and he is an incredible incredible chief technology officer. And we have a vision now that we would like to, build a a fully AI native, sales performance management go to market platform.
Amy Cook:Gotcha. So what we started doing was we we had an amazing, like, series of opportunities come down the pipeline because there's so much change in go to market tech. We were able to assemble a series of really exciting acquisitions together. So Fullcast, as we originally bought it, was just territory management and and quota planning, essentially. And so in order for us to get the rest of the the sales performance management capabilities that if you look at Forrester's 2022 sales SPM model, you can see kind of what we did.
Amy Cook:But we acquired Commissionly for incentive comp. We acquired Atrium for the analytics, and we acquired EBSA for the forecasting. And so now we have a fully state of the art sales performance management platform. And then AI hit us. And we're like, oh my gosh.
Amy Cook:AI and and not only like, we wanna be, like, best in the market, obviously. And so we're like, we're gonna have to rebuild some parts of this platform because this is a SaaS platform, and we want it to be AI native. Mhmm. And so we were able to acquire Copy dot ai, which has an incredible AI native base. And so not only do we have the marketing capabilities now, but we also have the AI native platform.
Amy Cook:So it's all come together in such a a fortuitous, serendipitous way. We feel really lucky about that.
Warren Zenna:That's really a great story. So let's walk through all those pieces. I mean, I obviously know EBSA, and that's how we got introduced. Yes. And know that's a terrific platform, one that, you know, we use for our programs.
Warren Zenna:But if you don't mind, just to kind of overview how all these pieces fit together. I assume it's somewhat, I would say, maybe, I don't know, sequential or the way in which a customer would engage with these tools at different stages, but I wanna make any assumptions. So I'd love to just hear just so I understand more, why these acquisitions, what was it that your vision was, how did these particular companies fit into what you're trying to do, and what's the sort of way in which you go to market with these products and services?
Amy Cook:Yeah. Absolutely. So if you look on the Forrester Wave sales performance management, it's really easy to see what we did. In the sales planning and optimization piece, there are six or there are five core capabilities there. And then there's one other core capability in sales insights.
Amy Cook:Those are territory planning, quota planning, capacity planning, incentive comp planning, sales forecasting, and advanced analytics. All of those, we now have because of that series of acquisitions. So the comp planning was the commissionly acquisition. The sales forecasting was EBSA, as you know, and what they do. And the advanced analytics, we were able to gather from, Atrium.
Amy Cook:So we now, believe that we have the the absolute best solution for sales performance management in the market. And it was really exciting for us because we knew we had a choice either build or buy. But everything is happening so quickly with AI that we did not believe that we could build everything natively like we needed to without having some help with some of the technology pieces that we were able to acquire.
Warren Zenna:Gotcha. Gotcha. So I see. So and your your market your target market is I mean, is it specific verticals, certain size companies, certain types of biz what what's the optimal sort of way that you're going to market right now?
Amy Cook:Who's Yeah. Great question. So Copy AI kind of changes the game because it's more broad. There are offerings for SMB. It's for any industry.
Amy Cook:It's both marketing and sales use cases. So Copy AI really in enlarged our go to market, but our core for the sales planning and for the SPM platform, our our target is mid market and enterprise. Usually, 75 sellers and above finds our platform to be absolutely dynamite because you've gotta have that economy of scale. You've gotta have a way to automate all of the different territory plans and and do all of the annual planning in a way that that doesn't take 1,500 spreadsheets like it took Bala when he was the RevOps lead at Salesforce.
Warren Zenna:Mhmm.
Amy Cook:So that's why Bala even got this idea in the first place was he was at Salesforce. He was in charge of the territory planning. It took him 1,500 spreadsheets, a team of 100 people, and six months to pull off the first ever on time and on budget territory planning. And he he was like, oh my gosh. There's gotta be a better way than this.
Amy Cook:And so that's why Fullcast was born.
Warren Zenna:Gotcha. Very cool. Very cool. So it's you and two other partners, and then how how big is the company right now? What's the size of the organization right now?
Amy Cook:Sure. So we have, five cofounders. So it's me. Ryan Westwood is our CEO. Mhmm.
Amy Cook:Isaac Westwood is our COO. Lance Evanston is our chief commercial officer, and Bala Bala Boscaran, the original cofounder of Fullcast, is our chief technology officer. Our team is small but mighty. We are about a 100 people.
Warren Zenna:Okay.
Amy Cook:And we are you know, we're making it happen.
Warren Zenna:That's great. Amazing. Thank you. That's a great story. So you know, because it's, like, a very interesting time right now.
Amy Cook:It is.
Warren Zenna:You know, we're not seeing a lot of companies whom have the risk profile where you're going to take on all these different pieces of a business and go to market. It's, you know, people are are taking small companies. They're building them themselves. They're funding them. They're going to market.
Warren Zenna:And then sometimes, they don't even last that long before they're subsumed by the larger LLMs who just basically add that as a feature, and they bake it into the bigger, you know, large language model. And they get sort of either bought or just get sort of kicked to the side. So it's an interesting time to see how new businesses are gonna emerge, whether it's the risk profile of starting this big company when, you know, who who knows what'll end up happening with with some of these things. So how are you managing that particular aspect of what's going on right now in the market?
Amy Cook:That is such a good question, and it is something that we talked about with that Ryan and I were on a podcast with the chief strategy officer of Sandler who asked us some really pretty point blank questions about that. He's like, you guys are, like, legit crazy. He didn't say that. But but that a lot of people in the market are saying, how are you going to pull this off? Right?
Amy Cook:And how are you going to be able to come together? And there are a few things that we believe are, are really going in our favor. The first one is the team. So at Simplus, we acquired eight companies and rolled them up successfully before we sold to Infosys. So we it's in our DNA, and we have a history of doing that.
Amy Cook:Isaac Westwood, our COO, has a a strong background in that. The second thing is that we've been very, very lucky, and this is another people thing, to be able to retain the CEOs of these companies. So, Guy Rubin, for example, that you know
Warren Zenna:Yep.
Amy Cook:Is is just an absolute talent, and I get to work with him every day. He reports to me, and, we we just link arms and and go. And he sees the vision of what we're trying to do. Chris Liu, the the CTO and cofounder of Copy dot ai, he is our head of our product underneath Jason Hidema, who is the CEO of Atrium, who is our chief product officer. Bala is our chief technology officer.
Amy Cook:And so it's really exciting to see and kind of rare, I think, to see people who are being acquired and then leaning in for a greater vision. So I think that's the first thing that we've got going for us.
Warren Zenna:Gotcha. Right.
Amy Cook:The second thing is that these these platforms work very, very well together. They all sync in really natively and nicely with Salesforce, and so they already work really nicely together. It's not like we're taking, like, you know, something built on Dynamics, something built on HubSpot, and something built on Salesforce and trying to pull that together into one platform. Mhmm. Everything works beautifully on Salesforce.
Amy Cook:We do have a lot of capabilities on HubSpot as well. And so it's not it doesn't it's not as disjointed as it might appear just if you're looking at acquisitions individually.
Warren Zenna:Mhmm.
Amy Cook:The third thing is we took the time before we acquired Commissionly, before we announced the Commissionly acquisition, to build commissions right into the full cast platform. So we have that full cast plan to pay platform. So we've been working on this for several months even before we announced that acquisition just so everything would bolt on very natively and and be embedded within that platform. The other thing is is we have been over like, we have been investing in r and d quite a lot, and we did a fairly large seed round of 34,000,000 so we would have the capacity to be able to do some of the things that we're doing right now.
Warren Zenna:Mhmm.
Amy Cook:Just between the four of us, that originally started this and before we acquired Fullcast, when Ryan, Isaac, Lance, and I raised the seed round, we raised we have 9,000,000 invested just of our own money. And so we're very, very highly invested personally in what we're doing. So I think, you know, with we have all those things going for us.
Warren Zenna:Mhmm.
Amy Cook:The the technology is syncing together beautifully. The people are syncing together beautifully. The tech is all aligned and and, with Salesforce as kind of our common thread. And so, I think that we're positioned well.
Warren Zenna:Thank you so much again for listening to the CRO spotlight podcast. This podcast is an important plank in the CRO collective communication strategy, and we're really thrilled to have such great guests on here. So, listening and sharing the podcast with other people is really vital because we wanna get as many people listening to this great stuff as possible. Couple things to note. If you're a aspiring CRO or a recently hired CRO or even a old salty CRO and you're looking to either become a chief revenue officer or improve your chops and gain some more insights and improve your competencies as a chief revenue officer, we offer the CRO accelerator course.
Warren Zenna:It's five years now. It's the first CRO focused course that was out there. It's a fifteen week course that is populated by aspiring chief revenue officers and CROs. We're pretty selective in terms of who can be a member of the CRO, accelerator course. It's, people whom are probably, like, more, like, ready to be a CRO right now.
Warren Zenna:They have number of years under their belt as a revenue leader, whether it be a sales leader or a marketing leader or even rev ops leader. And they either wanna move into the c suite or their CROs that wanna just make sure that they win in the role. So if you are interested in being a member of the next cohort, please just write me a note on LinkedIn. Just DM me, CRO Accelerator, and we'll set up a time to talk. And then I can send you more information to give you a brochure of the course.
Warren Zenna:So again, CRO Accelerator course, fifteen week program for aspiring and newly hired CROs. Take advantage of it. It's been great, and you'll see some more information about it on the website. Thanks. Mhmm.
Warren Zenna:It sounds good. So that's really interesting, this idea of taking a bunch of sort of, I wouldn't say necessarily vertically, you know, oriented companies, but they're specific in terms of the problem that they solve and linking them up together to create like a full, I'm assuming people don't have to buy the whole Megillah, right? They can purchase different services and within that for the family of services.
Amy Cook:That's
Warren Zenna:right. Get it. You mentioned all this stuff. It's interesting to me. You talk about leadership stuff.
Warren Zenna:So you're buying all these companies. They come with people. They come with histories. They come with cultures. How do you manage pulling them all together and creating one vision and one culture?
Warren Zenna:I mean, I've seen hundreds of these, you know, where some of them do really well and others, they just it's tough, you know? It's hard to kind of pull them all together into one thing, particularly when they have not just different cultures and different leadership and different histories and different legacies, but even just maybe they might have different visions or different ways that they do things or different types of operating, operating procedures and systems. How did you and how do you manage to sorta coalesce all these disparate organizations into one?
Amy Cook:That's a great question too. At you know, after working as an agency owner for fifteen years, I worked with three or 400 CEOs very closely. I've seen a lot of different cultures, and I've seen a lot of what works and what doesn't. I've also seen a lot of acquisitions and even been part of a few acquisitions. And what I've seen works the very best is what we're employing right now is, number one, communicate everything seven times.
Amy Cook:Seven times. Don't expect people are gonna get it the first time. The second thing is just to have, like, a very clear playbook. Clarity, in my opinion, is absolutely number one to the culture. So many people are willing to align around the culture that is, is is given.
Amy Cook:Like, not everybody has to have culture be a certain way. But if they don't know what it is, it feels uncomfortable and disjointed. And so that clarity and communication is number one. Mhmm. So in order to try to to do that, we have, like, company meetings once a month.
Amy Cook:I meet with both the the marketing and the revenue intelligence teams that I manage once every two weeks. We go through our company playbook and our values. We have we work through Slack on an everyday basis. We have a shout out channel that we're posting on daily. And so that clarity in our communication in the way that we run is really, really important.
Amy Cook:The second thing that I think is is is essential is acknowledging credit where credit is due. And that's my favorite part of it because I think there are so many incredible people who already have come together and spent so many years putting this whole thing together even before they knew they would become part of Fullcast for many years and celebrating the accomplishments of Guy, of Jason, of Chris, of Martin, of all of their teams and what they've done is just, to me, one of the greatest highlights of my career to be able to celebrate the awesomeness of these people who have done that. So I just think that those two things, the clarity and communication and really celebrating the wins of other people, it it really, helps unify people across cultures, across geographical locations. You know, on my team alone, I've got people who live in Nairobi, in The Philippines, in, Kenya, in The UK, London, and then several places in The US. And so that kind of distributed environment for a marketing team can only be done with clear communication and a real celebration of other people's strengths.
Warren Zenna:That's for sure. That's for sure. So now are you what are finding in the market right now? Like, of all the things that you offer, right, the different sort of points at which people need the service that you provide. What are you seeing is the place that is getting the most initial impact from people based on it?
Warren Zenna:I mean, you've got all these different, like various offerings that take place within different time frames and different stages of an organization, where do you see the market seems to be wanting first? What's the most desirable aspect of things right now that you find you're getting pulled when you're
Amy Cook:Great question. Well, I think that there's a massive curiosity around Copy AI, and we can see that from the lead flow. Right now, AI budgets are open where everything else is is closed. So for people who are wanting to be on the forefront of what's happening in go to market tech, AI is very interesting, and the budgets are available in areas where maybe traditional SaaS would not be. So we're seeing a ton of interest there.
Amy Cook:The some of the industries that we are seeing, our top four industries are that that we have customers in are, number one, software and technology. Number two, professional services. Interestingly enough, I was kind of surprised when I did the analysis there. And number three, financial services and number four, health care. Okay.
Amy Cook:So in many I mean, kind of what you would expect in b to b tech. Right? There's so many opportunities for digital transformation right now, and it's so exciting. I have the opportunity of doing a lot of, like, being the the main CSM for a large health care company. That's one of our clients.
Amy Cook:And it just brings me so much happiness to see that digital transformation happening, seeing their customers, you know, benefit, seeing health care benefits, seeing patient outcomes improve. And it makes you feel good that, you know, even though I'm out over here tinkering around with technology, there's there's an actual health outcome that comes from that.
Warren Zenna:Yeah. I get it. That's really interesting.
Amy Cook:Yeah. Yeah.
Warren Zenna:So what's your in terms of going to market, what what what are you doing? Like, what's the way that now you're okay. You got all these great tools. Mhmm. How are you figuring out how to get through all the noise?
Warren Zenna:I mean, there's just so many things that are, I mean, the amount of stuff I get now is insane. And I saw, you know, the demos of your your platforms and they're all great but you know, the amount of demos that are offered to me on a day to day basis is preposterous, you know?
Amy Cook:Oh, it is.
Warren Zenna:How are you figuring out like how to get in front of people and make them not only product aware but also that, you know, you're a consideration amongst the option, a different options people have right
Amy Cook:It's a great question again. And I would love your feedback on this too because I think you do this phenomenally well.
Warren Zenna:Well, thank you.
Amy Cook:But from my perspective, I think you've gotta balance, like, what you can do with AI to improve your speed and your ability to go to market and balance it really nicely with, like, the human side. Some of the research has been, you know, done. There's been a ton of research been done that shows that people really just wanna talk to other people for the most part unless they themselves want to choose to self-service.
Warren Zenna:Mhmm.
Amy Cook:So for me, authenticity is number one. Right? So if you if you're gonna show somebody if you're gonna work with an AI bot, make it obvious that it's an AI bot.
Warren Zenna:Right.
Amy Cook:Don't pretend like you're a human if you're not. You know? Like, that's my that's my number one. If anybody wants to reach out to me and sell me stuff, don't pretend that you're actually talking to me when you've just sent a which everyone does
Warren Zenna:Right.
Amy Cook:A series of automated emails that
Warren Zenna:all the same.
Amy Cook:That, you know, where an email number four says, did I catch you at a bad time? Are you not the right person for this? Like, it's it's just you know, we're all sick of it. Right?
Warren Zenna:Yep.
Amy Cook:So I think that I think the market has spoken. We're all sick of inauthentic communication, and marketing is responsible. Like, marketing is absolutely responsible for obliterating the way that sales communication one to one has happened because we have told everybody that you can automate everything, and you can stop the work, and you don't have to you can sit back and relax while the automation happens for you. And that is only true, and you will only get the benefit of that when you actually make it obvious that they're talking to an AI agent. That's one of the reasons that I think that companies you know, Qualified and OneMind are doing so well because they make it totally obvious.
Amy Cook:They're like, hey. We know that you just wanna self-service, and you wanna talk to you want you wanna explore this on your own without talking to anybody or having the pressure of a salesperson. We get that. This is what it is. But when you wanna talk to somebody, it's gonna be somebody.
Amy Cook:It's gonna be a real person that's knowledgeable. So I don't know. What are your thoughts on that?
Warren Zenna:Yeah. It's a good it's a good place. Certainly, I agree. I mean, I think you have to be real. I I you don't wanna bamboozle people.
Warren Zenna:I don't think people can be bamboozled. Not only that, but too, when they are bamboozled, they're mad about the fact that they're bamboozled. Bamboozled. Even if you win and they're mad later, they found out that they were. See, the why why put yourself in that situation?
Warren Zenna:And I also think to to some degree, some of these you know, what you spoke about before these cadences, I don't know if I'd call that AI as much as I'd call the delivery of it. It's just automation. I mean, you can you could have done that before a you just set up a a a cadence and it sends emails out. I think where the AI is interesting, and you know this better than me, is that it can formulate the messaging better for you because it knows the customer. It can look a lot of data to make sure that the messaging is a bit more tailored than being too generic, and it might be more impactful in that respect and Yeah.
Warren Zenna:Be more responsive. But the cadence is a cadence. It's just being sent out by a tool that just pings up. And you know that's happening. I mean, everyone knows that's happening.
Warren Zenna:Right. And I think there's some mild degree of latitude that clients will give you or prospects around this. Like there's some tolerance, pardon me, there's some tolerance they have until they're over their tolerance. Yeah. And, you know, I get a lot of these weird things.
Warren Zenna:There's a couple of things about it. I think there's there's let's just look at it, break it down. There's the technology, which is the stuff that enables you to do things.
Amy Cook:Right.
Warren Zenna:And then there's the way in which the tools are being used. Like, sometimes it's just not being used properly. For example, I'll see a lot of inbound stuff come to me, and I think, okay. You know, whoever sent this to me may have spent x number of dollars on some platform that they're spending money on to send me this message, but the strategy was bad. Like, they didn't send me the right message or it says the wrong thing or, you know, they're taking an approach that just seems sort of, like, weird.
Warren Zenna:Like, who came up with this? There's the intellect part of it was off. You know?
Amy Cook:Yes. You're right. That's the human part of it that's
Warren Zenna:still That's right. That's right. And you could see that, right? You could see like some unsophisticated person thought, you know, I I look at marketing as no different than any other sort of trendy fashion thing, which is no different than like, you know, you go to an event. And again, I'm I'm more like, you know, my wife is probably more prone to understanding these things and telling me about it than me but you go to an event and you know, you'll say, oh my god, I I can't believe she's wearing that.
Warren Zenna:That's like so three years ago, you know? Like, I can't she took that out of her closet. Like, no one wears that anymore. I feel the same way when someone sends me certain types of messages because that's the way they did things like three years ago. It's like, how
Amy Cook:can Yes.
Warren Zenna:Like, you know, the the shit that we did, like, some old thing, some tropey thing like, you know, I saw an article, you posted the thing and you said this, it was really interesting. Oh, by the way, we sell chicken salad. You know, like, what? Like, like, used to be done all the time. You know, as an attempt to create some personalization and I'm like, how did you do this?
Warren Zenna:This stuff is is over. It doesn't work anymore. So there's some choice someone made that just was offbeat or they missed a beat or they're not current or they're not talented. But, you know, the technology might be good.
Amy Cook:I totally you said that so well. And there's nothing wrong with that technology. No.
Warren Zenna:The tech is good. It's just you didn't use it right. Right? So that's that's that's another thing too. So I think maybe what AI is maybe trying to do is maybe stop you from doing that.
Warren Zenna:Like, so for instance, if I if I have an AI platform that is a bit more thoughtful to a weird word to say, you know, I would say, hey. You know, construct for me a outbound, cadence that reaches this audience, blah blah blah blah. And, you know, figure out ways to make, it relevant enough that my offering is, relevant to their current situation without sounding too, I don't know, like, cheesy or whatever you wanna give it. It can do that for you. You know, it'll it'll follow your instructions and if you know how to use it properly.
Warren Zenna:But you have to know to ask it that question in the first place. Right? Some people just sort of like, just make a make a make a campaign for me, you know, and it might come up with a crappy campaign. It might not it has to sort of like know what you're asking. And I think the more data and nuance that you can give these things, the more it'll work within those those guardrails.
Warren Zenna:But if you don't, it may give you stuff that people may think, and I don't know if it's everybody. Well, you know, I mean, this AI platform made this so it must be right. It must be good. I'm gonna use it. You know, he trust these things too much when it's not necessarily correct.
Warren Zenna:That's one thing. The other thing I think too is the channels themselves, right? So, interestingly, like, I I do, you know, LinkedIn is is the place where I do most of my business and I I I know that I need to do something about that because I'm sort of a little bit constrained to it mainly because it's just where I started everything and it's working. Right. And you know, you have to build up a awareness in other platforms.
Warren Zenna:So, I, you know, you know, if you're gonna start getting out to X for example, you know, you have to establish yourself there much the same way that I did here and so. That takes time. And you have to do it in a very specific way, and you have to have patience. Patience is something that a lot of organizations don't have because the stuff that works takes time. The stuff that doesn't work long term doesn't take time.
Warren Zenna:And we get too addicted to quick wins or quick results that yeah. I mean, I could stimulate the market and get enough people to write me back. But then I'm not gonna be able to do that sustainably for a long period of time and and then people are gonna wonder what happened and the reason is because you didn't build any trust or any value or any authority that is necessary for these things to make a difference. Yeah. And it's hard to do.
Warren Zenna:And so that's the other second part is, and also, what are you offering? So I talk to my clients a lot, like, what space are you in? So for example, if someone says, well, you know, we're in the go to market, we're in the go to market consulting space. Okay. I mean, it's needed.
Warren Zenna:There's no doubt you could say that there's people that need that but the problem is that a lot of people are doing it. Like, how many go to market consultants are out there? It's insanity. So, my question then is, well, what's your unique, you know, proposition in this area? Well, why why you, you know?
Warren Zenna:And if it's anything related to the delivery, that's not enough anymore. Oh, we're really good or we're really follow-up or we're thorough or we're right. Okay. Those are great, but I think that's table stakes. You got to do that.
Warren Zenna:It's got to be more some unique point of view that you have or some unique delivery proposition that you're making or some thesis that you have about the world that you feel is true that you can verify, that you think makes more sense, that you could be you can persuade people that that makes more sense, that you disrupt a bit. You know? Not for the sake of disruption, but that you you your idea is
Amy Cook:just have something interesting to say. I agree with it a million percent. Like, to your point about the, the cadences and the personalization, that's one of the things that copy.ai does extremely well. So you can build a workflow, and you you can say, hey. Here's the here's the content.
Amy Cook:Build me an outbound cadence that pulls in everyone's LinkedIn profile, that provides three different unique things here, that is in this style, that does this and this, that pulls in their background, that pulls in their education, and talks about whether they had a job change. And then it then it pulls something through. And you can decide to publish that, you know, to your outbound tool of choice. And so but I don't wanna misspeak and say I don't believe in in automation and AI. Totally do.
Amy Cook:I just think it's, you know, gotta have a thoughtful, strategic, you know, human centered experience around it. Like, you articulated very, very well.
Warren Zenna:Well, thanks. You do. Yeah. You have to have that. That that's people.
Warren Zenna:That's a people thing. I mean, you have to have, smart people that just know like what they're doing. I think I think that this promise that AI is going to sort of replace people. I don't think that's true at all. I think it's going to be a tool that enhances us.
Warren Zenna:I think a more like, I think of it more like bionics.
Amy Cook:Mhmm.
Warren Zenna:Than robots. Right? So, Steve Austin, you know, I'll be able to, you know, lift more or run faster. Yeah. As opposed to I'll be able to fly.
Warren Zenna:You know?
Amy Cook:I totally agree with that. And I think it also it's kinda back to my authenticity point. I think it exposes the creative human thought better now. So for example, like, when you're talking about disruption and having a point of view, like, you actually have to have one.
Warren Zenna:You have to have one.
Amy Cook:You have to have one. Because AI can do pretty much AI can do all the research for you
Warren Zenna:You can.
Amy Cook:In a second. Right? It used to be one of the hurdles was, oh, I don't have the resources to be able to to get the knowledge that I need, right, to to be smart in this, like and and to be, you know, experienced and to have a good, you know, my research background. But that that is that has been completely democratized in in one second. Right?
Warren Zenna:It has.
Amy Cook:And so now to differentiate between people who really know what they're talking about, the experts and the novices, is is that creative human thought. It is. You have to really know what you're talking about. You have to be disruptive. You have to have that real point of view.
Amy Cook:And I think that that is it can be very scary, especially if you're like, hey. I I just wanna keep going with the flow. Things things are interesting, but, like, you know, like, I don't really have any kind of, like, novel idea about how this market should work. Right?
Warren Zenna:Yep.
Amy Cook:I think that it it becomes very, exposing.
Warren Zenna:Thanks again for listening to the CRO spotlight podcast. We're excited about all the great guests we have. And more importantly, we're excited mostly about you for being avid listeners and supporting the work that we do here. Feel free, please, to share the CRO spotlight podcast with any of your colleagues. We just think there's a great wealth of information here, and I wanna get the word out to as many people as possible, and your your support of the show is really appreciated.
Warren Zenna:I wanted to share information about a program that we offer called the CRO Masters Council. The CRO Masters Council is a bimonthly group of six season chief revenue officers who are looking for a chief revenue officer board of directors, so to speak, that they could share what's going on with them, collaborate with ideas, get some feedback on what's going on in their current role. And these are great conversations. I facilitate them. The CRO Masters Councils, again, they're twice a month, and they last for at least six months to a year.
Warren Zenna:So if you're interested in having your own CRO suite, your own board directors of Chief Revenue Officers, it's a private, confidential conversation that we have. It's infinitely useful. Imagine having a room full of other chief revenue officers you can talk to and say, hey, I'm working on this, or have you guys figured that out? Or I'm having this issue right now with my business or my my results. These are just invaluable conversations with chief revenue officers.
Warren Zenna:Chief revenue officers have a very, very unique role. It's a very lonely job, and only other CROs understand what you're going through. So that's why we created this program. So if you're interested in being a member of the next CRO Masters Council, which we have a number of them being put together right now, just go to my LinkedIn and, DM me, masters or Masters Council, and I'll follow-up with you and set up a call or send you some more information about it. Looking forward to seeing you there, and thank you.
Warren Zenna:It is. I agree. It it's, when you know now everybody's really gonna be at the same tools as you, you don't feel like you have a secret weapon anymore. Mhmm. It comes back to you're still the secret weapon.
Warren Zenna:You know? It's still you. You know? So you're have to figure it out. However, you know, I'm seeing is I I work with people now who are really proficient at using these things, and one thing it can do, and it's really cool, is you can talk you can use, like, I think Chattyputee five is pretty good at this with deep thinking.
Warren Zenna:You could go to it and say, alright. So for example, you know, I'm not kinda like articulating some specific prompt, but generally, you could say something like, alright. You're a business analyst and you're world class, you know, consultant, whatever the hell it is. And you're going to help me work out a way to bring more value to my business. Right now, I'm seeing that we're sort of a bit commoditized.
Warren Zenna:A lot of people offering the same things I am and so, I want you to work with me to do a business analysis with me and work with me to bring ideas as to where we could go to market that's different or is disruptive that would give us an edge because I need someone to help me sort of think and it can do that. It can go out and say, you know, here are some ideas. Yeah. Here's some like things we're seeing. You know, maybe this, maybe that and and it it can act as like sort of a brainstorming tool for you but you know, again, you know, there is an interactive part of that.
Warren Zenna:Like, one is, you sort of have to know what questions to ask it. Number two is. Right. You sort of have to be able to kick the tires on the ideas they give you as good as they may be. Some might be brilliant.
Warren Zenna:Some might be, you know, you might find out that they're just they'd never work. They're just interesting, right? So, you sort of have to know.
Amy Cook:Yes, You do.
Warren Zenna:You still have to bring some of that stuff to the table.
Amy Cook:Totally agree. Yeah. So I have a a good example. So I'm working with, a colleague of mine, and, I'm putting together a plan for it's one of my clients. I'm putting together a three year plan for them in terms of, like, what new business offerings could they could they do in in a health care setting, and how could they go upmarket from SMB to mid market and enterprise.
Amy Cook:So I'm putting this together for them. They were you know, accessions is another word for a patient that they use and they their lab. And and so I'm asking ChatGPT about all of this stuff, and I'm using it for my math and my analysis. And I put together what they said in terms of how to go to market with common accessions. And I present it, and luckily, I presented it to one person who is the expert.
Amy Cook:And he's like, a, b, c, d, and e look really good. F, you cannot go to market that way. And this is why. And that's where this human element You need
Warren Zenna:someone to look Mhmm. It 100%.
Amy Cook:It was really it was very interesting, and it and it was very exciting to, you know, to see the interplay between that. You know, on the other side, I have one of my writers in particular, and I had a conversation last night about how nervous she is that her entire job is going to be just completely obliterated by AI because it is so good now. Right? Like, I can write I can write a press release in, like, five seconds and just go through it and add my add my stuff that I wanna you know, the personalization that we're talking about. Yep.
Amy Cook:You can do the same thing with an article. Luckily, it's not good enough now where, like, that, you know, the EEAT that Google, like, asks for the experience Yep. Already
Warren Zenna:I get it. Yeah.
Amy Cook:And that is still requires a human.
Warren Zenna:You do. Someone has to know how to do that. But
Amy Cook:Right.
Warren Zenna:As you know, we have an agency, and we do that, and we find that
Amy Cook:That's right. That's right.
Warren Zenna:The product, the the the content that we produce, big part of our business is is we find that, yeah, it's it's good but it's, you know, Google wouldn't love it, you know, the way we it needs to. So, we have to do a lot of work and you have to train somebody to understand that stuff and then, you know, what happens is, you know, next week, Google changes their algorithm and even though you can get an update from that, you still have to sort of know. There's people are still needed for a lot of these things, you know.
Amy Cook:That's right. But she was so nervous. So nervous.
Warren Zenna:I could see why. Look. That's you're being asked to is just write stuff, and no one cares. And, yes, you are you are gonna be obliterated. There's there's no doubt.
Amy Cook:And then we, you know, we acquired Copy AI, and all of a sudden, our productivity went through the roof, and she's sitting there thinking about her career. And, you know, we have a great relationship, and we just talked about, like I I come from a writing background, like I just mentioned, and and, you know, we I need her. I really need her. I need her to to to separate the the crap from the good and to be creative and to have her voice and all of those things. And so it's a really interesting time.
Amy Cook:And, Warren, as you, you know, have both the CRO collective as as well as your marketing agency, I don't think there's anyone better than you that that knows how this is affecting go to market like you do. Like, there are various people that know both marketing and sales like you do.
Warren Zenna:True. You're right. I I have a unique perspective because I do I had to both that. It's true. I don't think about it that way but yes and it is it is having a big effect.
Warren Zenna:In fact, you know, it's funny and this is not a pitch but just interesting. So, one thing that happened with us is for on my on my CRO side of the business, you know, I'm certainly seeing a mad rush for chief revenue officers understandably to become really proficient in in these tools because what's happening now is, you know, they're they're being asked when they take these jobs at what their AI strategy is. Not, do you have one? Like, what is it? You know?
Warren Zenna:And and bring it to this organization so you can help roll it through because our go to market engine needs to be fueled by these news tools because everybody else is. And we need to know how to roll them out and how to implement them. And then that's a very, as you know, a very complicated thing to do. It's not so easy to just take these things and use them. They they're it's it's not at all what people say.
Warren Zenna:So you have to know how to do that, which ones and all that stuff. Now the other side of it too, I'm seeing on the marketing side is we're seeing the speed with which companies can do things in marketing now that it it regardless of whether or not those things work, there's still a perception that it creates speed and efficiency. So, people are leaning in that direction regardless And it's they're just taking business away from people who may understand patience as virtue, but people aren't buying patience as virtue. They're buying speed. So what do you do?
Warren Zenna:Right? So, you know, just one of the things that we had to do in response was we never did any of this before. It's interesting. It goes back to what you said. So so what's happening, and I'm sorry to get a little technical here, but you'll get this.
Warren Zenna:So if you're if you're big if you're a particularly in, like, a regulated industry, whether it be a pharmaceutical, a health care, or fin fintech, or any of these highly complex regulated industries, one of the, you have a lot of issues related to approvals. But more importantly, what you have is usually if you're a well established company, you have a lot of content that you have on your website because you know that that drives a lot of views because it brings authority. It's So not uncommon to go to any FinTech sites or any these health care sites. They have massive amounts of content they've written on different topics since, you know, designed to sort of seed the marketplace. So, you know, as people search for things, you know, Google continually thinks that companies have authority for.
Warren Zenna:You know this. What happens, however, is this. So now today, if I've got, let's say, you know, 500 blog posts on my website and they're, like, two, three, four years old, couple things happen. One general thing happens is, let's say let's say, bucket one is they're just old. Like, they're just not they're not relevant anymore.
Warren Zenna:Like, they're written a long time ago, and if someone finds it, it's gonna seem stale. It's not updated. I would write that differently today. Mhmm. The second one is Google does a change in their algorithm, and those blog posts are not written properly anymore, and they need to be rewritten to accommodate that.
Warren Zenna:Number three is there's a there's a clinical trial that came out that changed some regulation in, know, in the other FINRA or HIPAA laws. And now those articles are not compliant. I gotta go back, and I gotta update them or they're in violation. And the third fourth one is now Google says we really like it when there are actual citations in articles from people whom are quoted and their and their bio is linked back to their or their PhD or whatever. And none of them have that.
Warren Zenna:What do do? So we have to hire a bunch of writers to go back into our CMS, find those posts, update them according to all these things, and then, you know, repost them. That's incredibly laborious and expensive undertaking. I have people doing this. So we built a platform that it basically ties into the back end of your CMS, any CMS, and it looks at every blog post that you have on your website, and you just use an LLM to automatically update them all in groups or single ones like this.
Warren Zenna:So you just tell it what to do. Like, change all the articles from this year that have this thing and update it to this new regulatory, and then it edits for you and then repost it back onto onto the website. So we we had to do this because we saw that, you know, it was no longer our clients were basically saying to us, we're not gonna do that anymore. I'm not gonna go back and change all those articles. It's too expensive.
Warren Zenna:But then we're saying, well, then those articles aren't gonna perform for you anymore, which is gonna be a reflection on our ability to be able to make the outcomes that we're trying to produce. Right. So we had to build a tool to enable them to do that faster to keep that thing going. And so, you know, it it this affects everything. It's everything.
Warren Zenna:So now we're in the software business, which I'm like, okay. Great. You know? So so I was
Amy Cook:just gonna say you're like the GTM Renaissance man. You
Warren Zenna:can do it all. To some degree. What oh, it's just an interesting pivot is is is very long winded part pardon me answer to your question, which is yes. This affects everything now because there now there's an answer to a lot of things that you could do that you couldn't maybe two or three years ago. Mhmm.
Warren Zenna:And as soon as you produce it, somebody else can do the same thing. It honestly was not that difficult to do, and we did it in a certain way that I think is hopefully keeps its self, you know, somewhat unique. But, you know, I mean, it's like anything. It's an idea. So, anyway, all I'm saying is that I think the world is changing and the profile of the go to market leader is changing.
Warren Zenna:It's a different person. You know? It is. There's a bit of an antiquated thing I'm seeing with a lot of people we work with that they need to level up a bit. And I that's a very threatening time for people whom, you know, are, like, crusty like me or, like, oh, crap.
Warren Zenna:I gotta keep up with stuff, you know, because some, you know, 30 year old is gonna make me look like a moron. And it's it's a it's a it's a real threat. It really it's a really interesting time.
Amy Cook:It's a real threat. It's very, very interesting. It it's also very interesting to see how, you know, some of the people that I work with are much younger than me, and they are absolutely so brilliant, so brilliant. But I still find that the experience gives me an edge because I've seen stuff happen before. Wisdom.
Amy Cook:That's right. You just can't us out yet. Right, Lauren?
Warren Zenna:You can't. There's no, I tell people, you know, there's no, you know, pardon my French. There's no suppository for wisdom. You know what mean? You just Right.
Warren Zenna:You have to just be around. You know? That's right. Butt kicked a lot. But it's true and you still need that.
Warren Zenna:You do. You know, there's a tolerance for stress, tolerance for chaos. There's an ability to manage complexity, people whom are a little bit more older that have been around longer. They have more familiarity with things when they don't go right and they're okay with it. They realize that the world's not gonna end and they deal with it differently.
Warren Zenna:They carry a little bit more author You know, if you've done a lot of stuff, it sort of carries in your energy. You know, people see you, like you know, they it just there's stuff that you can't define. Just someone who's just, okay. I'm gonna listen to this person for some reason. Okay?
Warren Zenna:And, you know, it it it helps quite a bit. You know? So, anyway, this is great. I love this conversation. Me too.
Warren Zenna:So I'm we we we're getting close to time here. So what are some ways that people can work with you guys? What's the best way for them to find you? I mean, I assume you do when you do a demo, do you, like, demo the entire suite, or do you just demo pieces? How does it work?
Amy Cook:We demo pieces. We basically try to be customer focused, and that's kind of the the message, I think, that you and I have been talking through and around today is it's really about being a problem solver and helping people understand how to how to go to market better and easier and eliminate some emotional and and, you know, business pain for them as well. And so for us, when someone reaches out to us, we we demo based on what they're looking for.
Warren Zenna:Gotcha. So if
Amy Cook:they're looking for a forecasting tool, we'll demo the EBSA, which we now call Fullcast Revenue Intelligence. Mhmm. If they're looking for b like, out of the box BI dashboards, we demo what we call now Fullcast Perform. And so that way, it gives us the opportunity to really meet people where they're at and hopefully help them anywhere along the journey. So Gotcha.
Amy Cook:But the best way to get in touch with with me is, Warren, we were gonna do some dinners together. Right? Yes. We are. So,
Warren Zenna:yeah, we're gonna be doing some events. Not a bad thing to talk about. So, as everyone knows, it listens, you know, the Sierra Collective has a series of serial roundtables which is you know, we're doing one together. Fullcast and and Sierra Collective next week in in Chicago on the nineteenth and I'm really excited about that.
Amy Cook:Yeah.
Warren Zenna:Got a pretty decent lineup of people coming. And then we're talking about doing a series of them next year and I couldn't be happier about that partnership. I think there's a lot of other things I've been thinking about that I think could be really interesting. So, we'll get a chance to talk about them but look out for those events and things and the you know, we have a AI course that we're launching ourselves because we want to dabble in that a bit more like AI for CROs, right? This is sort of a unique way AI needs to be kind of, you know, positioned to achieve revenue officer and that's coming up in January.
Warren Zenna:So you can go online to the cirocollective.com and take a look at it. But you're at the fullcast.com. Correct?
Amy Cook:That's right. Fullcast.com. Would love to chat with anyone. You can also reach out to me directly on LinkedIn. I'm active every day just like you are, Warren.
Amy Cook:Would love to talk with anyone.
Warren Zenna:Great. Well, I'm sure you will, and I really look forward to working with you. And thanks so much for being here. This is a great conversation as expected.
Amy Cook:Thank you so much.
Warren Zenna:Thank you for listening to the CRO spotlight podcast. The CRO Collective's mission is to help CRO succeed and help founders and CEOs build CRO ready organizations. You can find out more information about our services at thecrocollective.com. That's thecrocollective.com. And we look forward to having you join us next time.