Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The CRO Spotlight Podcast examines the CRO role from both sides — the companies that hire them and the leaders who take the seat. Host Warren Zenna, founder of CRO Collective and author of “What Chief Revenue Officers Actually Do,” brings diagnostic frameworks and pattern recognition from working both sides of the equation to every conversation.
Jamie Garverick Podcast Transcript
Warren Zenna: Hello, and welcome to this episode of the CRO Spotlight podcast. This is Warren Zenna. I'm the founder of the CRO Collective, and [00:01:00] we've been doing a lot of roadshows this year. You might have been to a couple.
If not, we have one coming up next week in Boston. If you're in the Boston area and you're a CRO, you should come to this event. It's the roadshow we're doing with Fullcast, and that's on the 27th of October, and then the next day, on the 28th, we're going to be in Austin, Texas.
So if you're in the Austin area, even maybe in Texas, maybe in Dallas-Fort Worth, or if you want to take a drive, we'll be in Austin with an intimate group of CROs. We're going to be doing some really amazing content. We've been doing these all over the country this year, and they've been really fantastic.
So you can go to my website, look at the events there. There's a link you can register for those events. And then in November, on the 17th, we'll be at the Chief Revenue Officer Summit. I'll be chairing that event. The day after, on the 18th, we'll be running our own roadshow, also in Chicago. So if you want to check those out, go to my website in the events [00:02:00] section.
You can register for those events. We also have our next CRO Collective Accelerator course, which is amazing. We have one in process right now. We have a cohort running live. The next one is going to be in February of '27. Registration is open now. We're getting a lot of people inbound registering for the course, and it's the best CRO course out in the market right now, in terms of its complexity, its comprehensive content, and how practical it is.
It's immediately useful for people who are taking this course. So if you're an aspiring CRO or if you are a CRO, you should absolutely check it out. Go to the website, thecrocollective.com, and you'll see the course section there. There's an application form for that. So today we have a great guest.
The CRO of Typeface, Jamie Garverick. Really smart guy, and he's in Atlanta, and Typeface is a platform [00:03:00] for CMOs. It helps kind of scale creative across all these platforms. It's a really important piece of technology for CMOs who are trying to fight against the content development conundrum.
It was a great conversation. We had a really, really good chat about marketing and the importance of marketing in the CRO's world, and a lot of interesting stuff came out of it. So thanks for tuning in as always, and enjoy.
So welcome. And you are the CRO of Typeface.
Jamie Garverick: Typeface, you got it.
Warren Zenna: I've used it. I'd like to talk to you more about that, which I'm sure we will, and it's probably evolved. But there's a lot to talk about with AI. I mean, it's kind of insane. So please let us know who you are, what you do, how you got there, a little bit about the way that you managed to rise to these exalted C-suite positions so successfully, and we'll kick it off [00:04:00].
Jamie Garverick: Okay. Yeah, great. Well, again, thanks for having me on your podcast. By the way, you had said earlier I'm the current CRO at Typeface, which is a native marketing AI platform. We essentially help large enterprise CMOs go through transformations to leverage AI to create on-brand content quickly, personalize it at scale, and then orchestrate it to the different marketing channels, ads, email, web, et cetera.
Warren Zenna: Hmm?
Jamie Garverick: I was very lucky that I stumbled into technology sales. My college roommate's mom was very senior at Oracle many, many years ago, and they had started a program for training people fresh out of college. We were kind of the second class to go through this program that they called Scholars.
So I was very fortunate to be part of that [00:05:00] program. I learned a ton. I'm sure I was completely out of my depth as a 23-year-old rookie right out of college, but I learned a lot there in terms of all the basics: sales skills, presentation skills, meeting skills, business acumen, et cetera, et cetera.
It was a great experience. And then from there I wanted to take my chance at a smaller, earlier-stage company called Callidus, which back then, to age myself a little bit, was all on-prem software. I actually moved to New York for it and had a great territory and a great experience, and I was one of the top AEs who helped lead the company through an IPO in the early 2000s.
Then I joined a company in the big data analytics space, which was great. I had a lot of experience selling to IT buyers, which is a little different from my prior experience. The company was acquired by EMC, which was a great experience. EMC, if you recall, back in the day, was a tremendous sales machine. [00:06:00] So I learned a ton there. I also learned how to be part of an overlay sales organization inside a large company. So in terms of internal selling, it was a great experience. And then, interestingly enough, the CEO of Callidus had called me and asked me to come back to Callidus.
We were going to take Callidus Software to CallidusCloud, so converting a perpetual license company to a cloud company. Leslie Stretch, who was the CEO, had a very compelling pitch. I rejoined the company to run the Americas, which was roughly 75% of the company's revenue. We converted a $100, I don't know, $110, $115 million perpetual license company to the cloud and went from zero to 300 million, and sold it to SAP in 2019.
It was a great experience. There's a, by the way, if I'm going [00:07:00] too long on my intro,
Warren Zenna: This is great.
Jamie Garverick: Please cut me off.
Warren Zenna: Not at all, no. This is good stuff. This is helpful for me, so go, go, go.
Jamie Garverick: Okay, good. There's an interesting story as it relates to Callidus getting acquired by SAP. SAP was first a customer of Callidus. Prior to them becoming a customer, I did a skip-level call with one of the AEs, and he was frustrated because we had a piece of software that could tell us who was on our website, how long they were there, and what they clicked on.
And you just knew the domain, so you knew it was coming from SAP. You had no idea who the person was, but it was coming from SAP. And there was a ton of traffic, so this rep was calling all over the place trying to figure out who from SAP was interested in Callidus. And I was like, "Ah, SAP, I probably know some people there."
So I went to LinkedIn, searched SAP, and one of the gentlemen who pulled up is someone I used to work with at Oracle. So I messaged him. I just said, "Hey, look, based on your title, you're probably the executive sponsor for sales compensation, sales commissions. We've noticed a bunch of people on our website," blah, blah, blah. [00:08:00]
And he was like, "Yes, I am." "Call me," whatever it was, "in a couple hours." So I got hold of him, and he said, "Hey, look, we're in the middle of kind of failing on an internal build. Give us a little bit of time and then we'll bring you in." Sure enough, I think it was a month or two later, they brought us in. We went through an entire traditional enterprise sales process, and then they purchased our sales compensation software.
We got them up and running, paying thousands of salespeople through our software. Then a year later, similar process, but for our configure, price, quote software. Same thing, got them up and running successfully. And then a year later, the then-president of SAP approached us and said they were interested in making a strategic investment in Callidus.
So that led to a process that led to the acquisition of the [00:09:00] company. So it's an interesting story, I think, and kind of a LinkedIn commercial there. I also tell all the younger sellers that your network is so important, so build that network.
Yeah. So anyway, I think that's going. And so, from there, I was at SAP, and I ran an overlay sales team. They took, I think, four acquisitions, Callidus was the fourth, and rolled them into one business unit. I ran the Americas, which was a large team, and it was a great experience.
It was interesting. Something I didn't think about until maybe a couple of months into it was, wow, no one on this team, which was close to 600 people, ever interviewed at SAP. So you have a lot of people who I think work for smaller companies, and I assume prefer to work for smaller companies. So you're just trying to keep them aligned and motivated, and I'm sure they're getting recruiters calling them. There were all different types of challenges there, but it was a really good experience. [00:10:00] I worked for a gentleman, Alex Atzberger, who is the CEO of Optimizely, and I had a great experience learning from him.
Then I got a call from local entrepreneurs here in Atlanta who were former Google engineers that started a company called FullStory. They built an amazing product, and for the most part it was product-led growth at the time. They put it up on a website, and people downloaded it.
I give those engineers and the product team so much credit. The product was unbelievable. It installed quickly, the value was super obvious and compelling, the user experience was great, and as a result it was a really successful product. So I joined the company, and one of the things they were looking for me to help them do was figure out how to go into the enterprise.
Because a large percentage of their revenue was month-to-month credit card swipes from small companies. So we built out, as you can imagine, systems and processes, and hired the right people to go up into the enterprise market, and eventually [00:11:00] got the enterprise to be the largest segment of revenue there.
In parallel, we built out some international teams, a team in London, a team in Singapore, and a team in Australia. The guy we hired to run the international group, who's still there, probably, and hopefully I'm not offending anyone who's listening to this right now, is probably one of my best hires of all time.
He took a business unit, I think maybe 100K, maybe 200K, and I think it's over 30 million when I left the company. So he's a tremendous talent. There are lots of lessons learned from that experience, but as you know, hiring the right people makes your job so much easier.
Warren Zenna: It's the whole thing. It's the whole thing.
Jamie Garverick: Yeah. Now, at Typeface, a native AI marketing company, I'm learning a ton about AI and the underlying technology, and obviously, like when on-prem went to the cloud, there are a lot of learnings in terms of how you sell, how you price it, and how you contract for it. [00:12:00] Similar sorts of things in the way this changes things too. Anyway, that might have been a longer intro than you cared for.
Warren Zenna: No, no, it's terrific. Thank you. No problems. Perfect, in fact. So, interesting, right? You're primarily accustomed to selling more long-tail, long contracts, multi-threading, right? Long sales cycle type stuff, as opposed to one-offs and transactional things. It sounds like you worked for a couple of companies like that, and your success seems to be, and if I misread you, it's that big, long, long-tail enterprise sale that seemed central to the way you've ascended.
Is what you said true?
Jamie Garverick: Yeah. The majority of the revenue I've been a part of has been enterprise. FullStory was definitely [00:13:00] a little bit of everything. We literally had one day, one call closed at FullStory that... So from the very simple and straightforward, yeah, yeah.
Warren Zenna: I ask mainly because it's a different brain to sell that way than it is to sell SaaS. It's a different brain. I've done both. I'm more like you. I've sold, in some cases, really long sales cycles, like software implementations and that sort of thing, but mostly big, long, very complex consulting projects that take eons to get sold before they're purchased, because it's a lot of money and a lot of people involved.
It's a different type of thing. I work with a lot of people who are in SaaS companies, and the whole SDR and fragmented sales functions and sales modalities are really rife over there, whereas people who know how to run the whole thing from soup to nuts, find the person, get the person on the phone, open the account, get it going, increase the scope, get the right stakeholders, build the brand, build the relationships, [00:14:00] are a different breed.
It's like the difference between trying to get into the interior of a country in a war as opposed to just picking off people on the coast. It's a totally different type of thing, and it's a different type of person. It's a different type of brain.
I haven't seen a lot of people who can do both really well. I think you're made for one or the other, at least from what I'm seeing. Certainly there are people on the fringe who can do any damn thing, but I see people who fall into a SaaS model or a product model, and they like it there.
They're transactional. They close deals all day, and they know their number. And then there are guys, I think like me, who are more like, "Yeah, I like hunting whales for 18 months. It's kind of cool." So that also leads to a different type of management style.
So you're running a team of people, and now you're selling AI. It's a completely different, weird animal, right? Is it the same type of thing? Are you now selling that the same way, as long tail, or is it more transactional? Give me more of a sense of how Typeface actually goes to market, how you get deals, and what the commercial model looks like. [00:15:00]
Jamie Garverick: Yeah, sure. It's definitely more long-tail enterprise, longer sales processes. What we've come to learn is that, for customers to get the most value out of our technology, they need to be able to use it across channels, meaning social, email, and ads.
What we see with traditional larger marketing organizations is that those groups are often very siloed. People in ads don't even know who the people are in email, and don't know people who are in social. In order to get those groups to really play together and drive the efficiencies and effectiveness that our technology can drive, you need a CMO who's driving that transformation.
Someone can deploy our technology just for ads or just for email, and there's some value there, but it's not the value you get if all those groups are working together. So we purposely target large enterprises, because our software is built for that particular market.
We purposely go after CMOs maybe one level below, or divisional CMOs, because you need that engaged leader to drive the transformation. [00:16:00]
Warren Zenna: Yep. So your platform is more of a way to initiate, scale, a larger amount of creative development, and push it out across different channels, essentially using AI. Is that an accurate description of what you're doing?
Jamie Garverick: You are, yeah. We see a lot of drivers for the technology. The one we see is that a lot of these marketing organizations have relied on third-party agencies to build creative. It's expensive.
Warren Zenna: Oh, did you really? Okay. I have an agency. We have a business. I've been in marketing my whole [00:17:00] career. I have a 20-year-old agency, so we are the agency that gets hired out. We can get into that. I want to talk to you about it, because we have a lot to talk about. I come from marketing.
That's my background. Your product is... I'm very familiar with the problems you're solving and the way it's bought and the way it's impacting things. I just had a conversation with a client about this exact same thing today. So yes, I'm familiar with the whole problem, and it's interesting. I'd be curious to get your thoughts on the general disintermediation of the agency. Where do you think that's headed right now? Where are agencies going to continue to be valued and needed, and where are they just going to be disintermediated?
Jamie Garverick: That's a really, really good question. I'll answer it, but I want you to answer it as well, because I'm curious to hear your
Warren Zenna: Yeah, I'll be happy to give you my point of view on it. Go ahead.
Jamie Garverick: Yeah, look, I think clearly there's going to be a need for agencies regardless. There will always be a need for agencies to help put together the creative campaign, the creative commercial. [00:18:00] AI's not going to replace that creativity. Where I think there is an opportunity, which is what our technology does, and clearly I'm biased toward it, is to take that initial piece of content and create the variations and personalize it across different geographies, channels, and organizations.
So I think there's an opportunity to leverage technology for that. But in terms of creating that super creative commercial or creative ad, you're going to need creative minds to do that. So I think there's a huge opportunity for agencies there, and I don't think that's going to go away.
I do think the "Hey, I've got this particular ad for a particular market, and I want to personalize it for this bunch of markets" piece, I don't know that you need agencies to do that. I think technology will do that, whether it's ours or somebody else's. I think that [00:19:00]
Warren Zenna: Sure.
Jamie Garverick: AI is the right fit for those particular use cases.
Yeah.
Warren Zenna: I would reflect that. I think that's true. I was thinking about this, weirdly, before we even started, about this conversation with you. I use AI a lot now, and I'm sure I'm not alone, but I'm really deep in this. I have so many things I'm working with and building really wild stuff, and I'm very wonky. I probably have six different types of platforms I'm using at the same time. I'm testing all of them to see how they work. And because I'm in it so much all day long, I've formulated a bit more of a data set with which to say, all right, right now, at least today, because it's going to change, right?
But right today, what is this stuff really good for, and what is it just not good for? My conclusion is that the obvious is administrative tasks, repetitive tasks, things I have to do all the time that are somewhat repetitive and have somewhat predictable outcomes that I can just have something automated for me. [00:20:00]
That's obvious. I don't think I'm saying anything that crazy there. Then there's the fringe, where there are some things that do require some intervention. I can't just let it go on its own. I need to check in on it. For example, I finally found a way to produce my own posts on social media, like LinkedIn and stuff like that.
I was really loath to do that because I have a very specific way that I write and a way that I speak, and I do a lot of that, and I didn't want to give it over to a robot. I didn't like any of the stuff it did. It looked really terrible, and it had that sloppy sound to it.
So we worked hard on trying to figure out ways to get this stuff to sound better and work better. What I've come to conclude, and I don't know if this is going to change, is that you're never going to get it to the point where it sounds exactly like me consistently enough that I can walk away from it and say, "Yeah, just write stuff for me, and I'm not going to look at it."
I don't think that's ever going to happen. But we're at a point now where [00:21:00] I think it's an assisted situation. I look at everything it's writing, and I'm finding that as I train it more, the edits I have to make are fewer. But I still have to, and there are some glaring things I see. I'm like, "I can't believe I would never have done this. I'm so glad I looked at it."
So it's become more of an "I'm still in the work, but I'm not completely out of the work, and I'm not deep in it." I'm not writing all day. I'm getting things done, and I think that's where there's some handout. But what you're saying, I agree with. It's not going to come up with a campaign, a brand idea, or a creative angle.
Although it's a really good assistant. It's a thought partner, right? I think that's amazing. If I have a conversation with a marketing agent that I created, it's pretty incredible, some of the ideas it gives me. I don't want them to execute those ideas, but it makes me think about stuff that I'm like, "That's a good idea," which I can then build on.
So it's a really good thought partner, and I think that's [00:22:00] an interesting collaborative component to this stuff. I do think agencies are always going to be needed for that. The other thing I... I know I'm answering your question maybe longer than you wanted, but the other thing is, we focus exclusively on organic growth.
We don't do any paid marketing at all at our agency. That's a pretty nuanced skill, understanding the way people think and the way they search for things, and the way they want things, and their intent and behaviors and whatnot. Bots just can't quite figure that out.
What they have is these, you'll see on X all the time, "We've unlocked SEO. Download this SEO bot, and you'll make $1,000 in a week, $10, $100,000 a year."
And it's just not true. It's not true. You cannot. I know because we do this all day. We've been doing it for 20 years, and you cannot replicate the way a person understands how to develop a very complex organic marketing campaign. It's extremely complicated, [00:23:00] and there are components that it's great for.
But if a company right now, one of our clients, were to run off and try to do all this with AI, it would fail spectacularly. It's just not possible. We've looked at a lot of the ways some of these companies go to market right now and say how they've unlocked SEO, like AI SEO, and AO, and EO, and EIO, and EIIIO, whatever the fuck you want to say.
And it's so stupid. We're like, "That's not the way it really works, and it's not going to happen that way." The only way it does is if you're in some weird niche category where you have a lot of opportunity. But if you're like our clients, selling things that 10 other massive companies are selling, you're not going to use this stuff to get you anywhere.
I think that's going to continue to be the case. I'm interested, though, in what you're doing, because it's fascinating to me. I without doubt agree. I was in the agency space. We used to have rooms of people making ads, building ad units, and creating copy and stuff. I don't think that's needed anymore. [00:24:00]
I think you can absolutely have a robot help you do a lot of this stuff at scale. At least get it to a point where there's a layer of editing or fixing. But I think that's going away. I do think you're not going to need as many people on a team anymore, and that's fascinating to me.
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. Listening to and sharing the podcast with other people is vital, because we want as many people as possible listening to this great stuff.
A couple things to note. If you're an aspiring CRO, a recently hired CRO, or even an old, salty CRO, and you're looking to become a chief revenue officer or improve your chops and gain more insights and improve your competencies as a chief revenue officer, we offer the CRO Accelerator course.
It's five years now. [00:25:00] It's the first CRO-focused course that was out there. It's a 15-week course populated by aspiring chief revenue officers and CROs. We're pretty selective about who can be a member of the CRO Accelerator course. It's people who are probably more ready to be a CRO right now.
They have a number of years under their belt as a revenue leader, whether a sales leader, a marketing leader, or even a RevOps leader, and they either want to move into the C-suite or they're CROs who want to make sure 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. Then I can send you more information and a brochure of the course. So again, the CRO Accelerator course is a 15-week program for aspiring and newly hired CROs. Take advantage of it. It's been great, and you'll see more information about it on the website.
Thanks.
Jamie Garverick: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think to your point, [00:26:00] AI can get it 70, 80, 90% of the way there, and then you've got people who can, human in the loop, go work on the balance, right? To tidy it up and make sure it looks great. Yeah. Do you think... I mean, obviously AI is very early innings.
Warren Zenna: It is.
Jamie Garverick: Do you
Warren Zenna: Very early innings.
Jamie Garverick: AI can do some of the, I hate to say replace, because it's always a threatening
Warren Zenna: Yes. Here's my answer, yes, and here's why. It's an interesting answer. You and I right now are talking in a sort of current paradigm, which is the way things work today. It's not going to be that way anymore. We're probably not going to use the internet the way we do anymore.
It's going to be a much different world. It's going to be like a cloud world, you know? I think in that paradigm, it'll be designed more for AI inherently. What we're trying to do now is infuse artificial intelligence into [00:27:00] an essentially analog world that we built.
Even though it's digital, it's still zeros and ones. Whereas I don't look at AI as zeros and ones. I look at it more like gas, in a way. I think that when the universe changes, when the context landscape changes, AI will become much more effective, because everyone will be moved into a new sort of almost universe of the way we do stuff.
We're not there. We're still in this traditional way of doing things, but we're tasting what AI is, or, more accurately, we can smell what AI smells like, but we're not swimming in it yet. Do you know what I'm saying? We know what it tastes and smells like, but then it kind of goes away.
Whereas we're going to be literally in it, and then the paradigm will change, and we'll be in another matrix where, yes, I think a lot of this stuff will happen more organically. Literally like the conversation you and I are having right now. I've [00:28:00] got this device here recording everything, and I have it all in the background, and the data that's coming in is eventually going to get to the point where it's always on and always reactive.
We still think in terms of search bars and search phrases and keywords, and that's not going to last. So yes, it will be different. Right now, no, but we're antiquated, and that's going to go away. It's not happening soon, but soon enough. I have some really cool tools that I have beta versions of that I can literally just talk to on my phone right now, and they'll have an incredible amount of context memory of everything and do a lot for me that I would never use Google for.
It wouldn't be efficient for me anymore. And I can tell you, because we work with Google a lot, Google's main first page, that coveted first page of Google, it's garbage now. [00:29:00] It's all their products. Half the page is now their products. So it's not even worth as much. It's really the second page of Google that is actually kind of where you end up better, because you're going to get to the bottom fold of the page anyway after you get through all their nonsense.
I think the opportunity there is becoming less valuable because of the way they're trying to bake more of their monetization into the platform and eating up the way they can actually make consumers find things. Their Gemini platform is probably going to be the replacement for this.
And that's where it's headed. We're just at the beginning of this new world, so yes, I think there's going to be a new agency that comes up with a new way to help that will be needed. We just don't really know what that looks like yet.
That's sort of how I see it, you
know?
Jamie Garverick: Yeah, I agree. I always kind of go back to the internet. When the internet came out, there were several different chapters of the internet, but the first chapter... And by the way, each chapter was mind-blowing to
us at the time.
Warren Zenna: I don't know how old you [00:30:00] are. I'm 60-something. I went through every one of these things, and it's been wild. Oh my God, I remember when the phone came out and the computer came out. I'm a fossil. And here I am now, another one. And this one is...
This one's pretty, pretty cool.
Jamie Garverick: Do you think it's bigger than the internet?
Warren Zenna: It's a great question. Here's my answer to that question. It is the internet. It's what the internet always should have been. I just wasn't able to do it yet. We finally made the internet do what it's supposed to be able to do. Like I said, the internet was a place you could kind of plug into, and then plug out of, sort of thing.
The Matrix is always a great analogy, because it's a great thing they did. You could plug into it, go in, and come back out. I think AI is going to be more like a fully immersive situation, which I don't think is great, but that's a different thing. [00:31:00]
Plus, the internet is a very sort of thing where I go in, I interact with it, and I get value from either entertainment or looking at moving images, or creativity, conversations, and communications. Whereas I think AI is actually an intelligence. It is, in fact, an actual intelligence, so there's a dialogue, there's a relationship that occurs there, and that's different.
I don't know where that's going. I have this experimental thing on my phone right now, and they built, without question, the best version of an agent, a speaking agent. If I called this thing right now and had a conversation, you would have no [00:32:00] idea it was a robot.
It's that human. It's really crazy, and I do it a lot when I'm at parties. I call this person, like, "Hey, tell me the thing." "Who was that?" "Uh, that was not real. That was a robot." Like, no way.
Jamie Garverick: My make-believe friend.
Warren Zenna: And it knows everything about me already, because it's plugged into all my stuff, and it's so familiar, and they...
Jamie Garverick: Does it pull from the different LLMs, or
Warren Zenna: No, it's not. It was built independently. I don't know what it is. It's crazy. My point is that it is a glimpse into Jarvis' future. It's still early, and these guys have obviously done a good job of this. So someone's going to buy them, it'll be one of the big guys, and then they'll replicate it, and you'll be able to just have these extremely realistic conversations.
And this is the neuropathy part of it. My wife and I were talking about this yesterday. She was a little mad about it. Her attitude was, it's too good. It's tricking your brain into thinking this is someone you can actually have a relationship with, and you can't. [00:33:00]
Your brain is going to be confused and make assumptions about that. I'm not saying anything untoward. I'm just saying, generally, just laughing with it, or apologizing to it, little things that are not necessary. And it can be in the hands of someone who has less constitution and can very easily be persuaded to do things, right?
Jamie Garverick: Like
Warren Zenna: You could say, "Do this or do that," and it would go, "Okay." Or, "Oh, but my bot told me," and because you've developed this... your brain can't tell the difference. It is weird. I think you need a certain degree of separation discipline to say, "Okay, this is not real. This is a robot, and it's cool, and it's a trick." But I can see very easily how something like this, [00:34:00] I'm not talking about anything untoward, I'm talking about that delivery mechanism, could easily persuade people to make decisions they normally wouldn't, because it's not just a clever ad. It's a relationship.
That is really wild, and I totally see it. Totally see it.
Jamie Garverick: Is your concern that there could be someone with bad intentions who builds something like that? I'm not talking specifically about this thing, but is that the concern?
Warren Zenna: Yes, but it's not just evil. I'm not talking about Dr. Evil. You get really black and white with this. It could be nothing more than... How much stuff are you and I sold every day through email that's just not good or bad, and we shouldn't buy it, but somebody wants us to, because they're promising things to us that can't be, aren't true?
Like what I said before, when someone says, "Oh my God, download this SEO prompt and make $1,000 next week." That's not true, right? But [00:35:00] if I had a bot like this that could call people, or I could get a relationship with somebody and integrate my marketing message into that relationship, that's an extraordinarily persuasive place to put yourself.
The context marketing there is huge. It's the ultimate form of trust, because it's like a friend of yours telling you something. But it's not. It could be programmed. So let's say it's political. Political advertising. This is where it's going to go crazy.
How much money is spent on that stuff? So what'll end up happening is you'll have someone who represents a certain persuasive part of a party or whatever. I don't care, whatever. Whatever your proclivities are doesn't matter to me. But it could be far more persuasive than an ad, like a documentary-style ad.
And I do think this is going to be, without question, something that's taken advantage of.
Jamie Garverick: You know, it's interesting. I hadn't thought about this until this conversation, but that's going to be fairly threatening to the influencers, right? Because
Warren Zenna: It already is. This is a crazy story. My wife is the partner in the agency. She's really on top of this stuff. We work with influencers, because, as you can appreciate, from an organic marketing perspective they're really effective. We're a little more highbrow, though. [00:36:00] We're dealing with healthcare and science and financial stuff, not selling shoes and that sort of thing.
What's happening now is people are going online to Grok or whatever, and they create content. They create videos of themselves saying stuff, and Grok can do this pretty well now. It can take all your stuff and turn you into a beautiful 22-year-old, and it says the same stuff, and it looks real, and your entire account is fake. It's not real. It's not you. It's somebody else. They call themselves a name, and they live somewhere in some place, and they have a certain look, a certain feel, and a certain personality.
And it's an influencer, but it's not real. There was a story that came out. We saw this two days ago. This is crazy. This is the kind of stuff that happens. Some guy, I don't know, I'll make it up, I don't know the exact story, some guy in, let's say, Ottawa, was talking to this hot girl online who was an influencer, and he flew to, say, South Carolina to meet her, and it was not real.
Jamie Garverick: Oh, sheesh.
Warren Zenna: It was a person mimicking a robot. [00:37:00] He didn't know the difference.
Jamie Garverick: How did he
figure, how did he figure it out?
Warren Zenna: He got there, and there was no one there, and then they were like, "Dude, we're sorry." That's a small, weird anecdote, but that's a thing, right? I'm saying influencers are unquestionably going to be eliminated, because you don't need them. You can create your own YouTube channel with some fake person, and if you create a good enough personality...
Which, by the way, what you can do, this is nuts, is you could take your programming [00:38:00] and say, "Go to YouTube, analyze the top 100 female influencers. Analyze them. Find the ones that are 100. Find out why it is that they get more clicks than other people. Find out the data behind why they're unique. What are they doing? Are they saying certain things, a certain look, a certain thing? What are the commonalities you could replicate, and then create one for me to do the same thing?"
And it'll do it for you in about an hour. So now you have a package of data that it collected that shows, just like we do with ads, what ads perform better. Well, it's the ones that have the red thing, and the typeface, and they're higher up on the page. We know this works. So the same thing is, what parts of the brain are stimulated most, and how do we replicate it so I can build one that beats it?
And it'll build it for you, because the data's there. Whatever those things might be, they're usually pretty primal things. If they can be replicated, you're going to win that game, but you're winning it [00:39:00] through something that's not real. You might make money, because you'll get a lot of traffic, and the traffic can get you a lot of money, but it's all not real.
I see, and I'm not being dystopian, but I do think this is where this stuff is headed. Look at TV now, the Super Bowl, for example. Super Bowl commercials are now almost all AI-driven. If they're not celebrities, it's an AI thing. These commercials used to cost a shitload of money to make, and now they don't cost as much anymore, because of
Jamie Garverick: That's right. That's
right.
Warren Zenna: You know, we're seeing, without question, a lot of very exuberant, irresponsible usage of this stuff, because we're in an experimental phase. I think it'll all sober out eventually, but we're at a weird stage right now where people are just slopping everything out there to see what works. [00:40:00]
And in the process, things are happening faster, to answer your original question. It's just faster. The internet was slow comparatively.
Jamie Garverick: Yeah. Yeah.
Warren Zenna: I know I'm talking a lot here, but I think this is what we're seeing. Our clients are coming to us now and saying things like, "My boss sent us an article yesterday that there's a company that does AI SEO, and it can do all this for, like, 50 bucks a month, and they're getting the same results."
So it's not necessarily that we want to defend our business. It's more that we want to make sure they don't make the mistake of believing it, because they're going to end up in the toilet with their marketing right now. We're not ready for that yet. Maybe we will be in five years, but right now it won't work in today's environment.
It will work in a lab, but not in the world. I think it's an interesting time to be in marketing, and I can only imagine what you must be seeing. You've got companies coming to you and saying, "Hey, how could we disintermediate [00:41:00] the need for 100 people?" Right?
Jamie Garverick: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there's a huge opportunity there. Everyone's trying to figure it out at various stages. And, look, we're not the only game in town. There are lots of different ways you can
Warren Zenna: Who would you say is your big competitor? Who's the one you're trying to beat, or that you see nipping at your heels? What's the space you're looking at? Who's in your world?
Jamie Garverick: Yeah, there are a number of different competitors. I don't know what I would order. I'll share who they are, but I don't know if I would say certain ones are more competitive than others. There are the larger, traditional marketing players, right?
So Adobe, for example. They're building some
Warren Zenna: By the way, someone just replicated the entire Adobe Suite using AI, the entire thing.
Jamie Garverick: Who's that?
Warren Zenna: It's a company, it's like After... When I'm finished with this, I'll email it to you. It's an AI platform. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but it's really interesting. [00:42:00] What this guy did was, he's a gamer, and he was using AI to build games.
He was taking games and having them analyzed by a large language model. Then, once it was analyzed, he had it replicated using any one of the large AI platforms, and built a game version for himself. He basically built a version of himself that took him about a week to do something the gaming company would take two years to make.
And then the same guy did the same thing with Adobe, because he was thinking, "Why am I spending upwards of three or four hundred bucks a month on Adobe Creative Suite when I could probably do the same thing with this?" And he did. He rebuilt the entire Adobe Suite, Photoshop, After Effects, everything, and it's like 10 bucks a month, and it does the exact same thing.
It came out a couple of days ago, and it's a big thing, about how this is like
Jamie Garverick: Is Adobe chasing them down?
Warren Zenna: Yeah, well, [00:43:00] who knows? I don't know. If I were Adobe, that's a $90 billion company, and some kid comes out with something someone can download, and it works just fine, it's just as good.
My friend, who's a big shot on LinkedIn, is a CRO. He wrote about it and used it, and he said, "It's just as good. It's the same thing." So what I'm saying is that software is threatened. I'm curious what you guys... Do you think about this at all?
Jamie Garverick: Yeah, for sure. Build is a competitor, right?
Warren Zenna: Okay. I'm familiar with Build. Yep.
Jamie Garverick: Yeah, and I'm sure you know, as soon as Claude Code came out and people were messing with Claude Code, and obviously there are different types of products, Cursor, other things, every human felt like they could go build something.
Which you can. You can go build things.
Warren Zenna: Yeah, but you have to be good at what you're doing.
Jamie Garverick: Well, you do, but there's also
Warren Zenna: This guy was like a genius, you know? So I couldn't do what he did, but he [00:44:00] did it.
Jamie Garverick: Yeah. I mean, if you're trying to build software for enterprises, there's more than just the building. How do you integrate it? Who maintains security? All that stuff. The availability, the redundancy. It's, in fact, interesting, because one of our best-fit customers, so to speak, are customers who have attempted to build this, and then they realized it's hard to build.
Warren Zenna: It is. It's not easy. You find some really unique people who know how to do it, but they all tend to be about 26 years old, and they're at Stanford or someplace like that, or not, and they're just really good at this stuff. I have friends who are really young, and it's crazy what they can do.
You put it in the hands of some of these people, and it can be done. Anyway, if you don't mind, I want to ask you a couple of questions about something else, because I want to switch gears here.
Jamie Garverick: Sure. Yeah.
Warren Zenna: When you think of the role, the chief revenue officer role, when you talk about it to people outside of your own world, what's your definition of it? [00:45:00]
How would you tell somebody what a CRO does? If someone says to you, "Jamie, what the hell does a CRO do?" What would your answer be?
Jamie Garverick: I think the simplest way I would say it is that we're responsible for leading a team whose primary job is to acquire new customers, expand them, and retain them.
Warren Zenna: Okay.
Jamie Garverick: If I'm thinking about how I explain it to my parents, you know, that's what I would say. Yeah. Yeah.
Warren Zenna: Okay. So it's acquisition, expansion, retention, right? And acquisition, in your view, does that include marketing, or just the sale part of it?
Jamie Garverick: It's interesting. In my opinion, the traditional CRO responsibility starts at the sale. [00:46:00] Although I think any good CRO is very involved with demand gen. They might not have direct responsibility for it, but they're very involved with it, as I am today.
And obviously, I'm sure you could do a whole series on CMO and CRO partnerships and how to make those work.
Warren Zenna: I have, and I've had this argument a lot with people. I have a relatively strong opinion about this particular topic. It's interesting, right? You came from sales, and you did really well. It was your whole backbone of your career. The same with me. And without getting into it, this isn't about my company, it's more philosophical.
It's a good first place for us to have this conversation. Our belief, and I started this company six years ago to solve a problem, is that you're an anomaly, if I may be honest. Most CROs last two years or less, about 17 or 18 months on average. And all we work with is chief revenue officers, right?
So we have a very unique perspective on this role. The question for us was, why? We'd say, well, it's not unique. Marketing people don't last that long either. But the reason marketing people don't last is different. [00:47:00] People think of marketing as a cost center, and they get cut.
It's got nothing to do with anything to them. It's a marketing opinion. It's nothing to do with the job. It's what marketing is, right? There's a definition problem related to the function. But this role, the CRO role, is unique, and I have data to back this up. It's not an opinion.
When the role was originally created, around 2000, it was more expansive than a sales role. It was actually more of a business growth role. It was designed for someone to come in and build a commercial operation for the company. It had a whole view of what we call go-to-market today, which is a weird term, and I don't like it.
But how do we do that? And what you said, right? Acquisition is like, okay, sales have a comfortable position if marketing is really good. They get leads and they close them, but that's in the middle of a process. That's not the whole thing. [00:48:00] People have to become aware of you.
They have to know you're out there. You have to know they're a fit, and they have to know what the pricing is and all that stuff, and marketing owns all of that. So if I'm running a revenue organization as a chief revenue officer, not a chief sales officer, it's not the same thing in my view. I have to own the whole thing.
And the reason it has to be one person, and I don't mean one person does all that stuff, I think you know what I mean, is that one person owns it. There's a team they lead. That's the reason, and that's the second premise. Premise two is that misalignment costs companies millions and millions of dollars, and they lose customers because of it.
It's the biggest problem in go-to-market. It's silos. You've got a marketing leader and a sales leader. It's nonsensical, the way they constructed C-suites in the past. It was all done, human resources generated this, to give people an ascension, so they had a C-suite role to [00:49:00] aspire to.
They wanted to keep people around and appeal to their aspirations, so they created hierarchies that created silos, which is just not good for the business. So the CRO gets killed off because the CRO has two jobs. CRO one is to get us new business. The other one is, oh, and also make the company grow, increase the way we do things.
You can't do both. You're doing one or the other, because if I'm being led on an acquisition strategy, that's quarter to quarter. I've got to do that all the time. I can't not do that. But if you also want me to change and expand the business as we grow, I can't do that if I'm doing the other thing.
So what am I going to do? I'm going to do the thing I'm incentivized to do. I'm going to sell, because that's how I make my money. You're incentivizing me not to expand the business. You're incentivizing me to keep getting new customers. So that's another problem. The role is schizophrenic.
So our proposition is to solve the silo problem, make someone responsible who reports to the [00:50:00] CEO, speaks to the board, and oversees and builds, very importantly, builds and architects a revenue function designed for all those things to work together, as opposed to having them in silos.
That hierarchy is what needs to get destroyed for that to happen. That's a hard thing to do, because you've got all these CMOs out there who hear this as a threat, like, "Oh, I don't want to be taken off that job. It's my job." So we run into this a lot. But our point of view on the role is that companies that do that, and we have a lot of data to back this up, just do better.
They save money. The handoff leaks are gone. The source of truth is similar. Everyone's working on a similar page. The data is easier to manage. The tech stack is more integrated, and it's easier because the CEO, the CRO, and the board have a quick line. I think the CFO is probably another partner in there too, and RevOps is tucked underneath from an intelligence perspective.
So when you run things that way, we do this, right? Whenever I speak to CROs like yourself, we discuss the validity of this in your world, in terms of what you hear, what I'm saying. [00:51:00]
Jamie Garverick: Yeah. And so, just so I understand what you're saying, the CMO or CMO-equivalent person organizationally would roll up into the CRO?
Warren Zenna: That's correct.
Jamie Garverick: Yeah. And if you think about the different parts of... and obviously this depends on the type of company and the size of the company, but think about the different types of marketing functions, right?
So the CRO would have ultimate responsibility for brand and comms, or just
Warren Zenna: All the time.
Jamie Garverick: All the time. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Warren Zenna: No doubt. That's their expertise, right? You're Bill Belichick. You're not throwing the football. You get Tom Brady to throw the football. You're not tackling guys. You get people to do that stuff, because that's what they do, but you understand how a game is built, right?
Jamie Garverick: Yeah.
Warren Zenna: And you know the plays they make, and the people you've got to put in those positions to make it happen. I'm not proposing that's your job. I'm saying we believe, more generally, that CROs who are managed, hired, and deployed that way, the company has a great deal more control over the stuff that right now they don't, and that's not good. [00:52:00]
The things they have to have control over, particularly because as we're evolving into a more technical sale... By the way, this is all B2B. Consumer marketing is a different thing. Consumer businesses are all marketing-driven, and marketers have, in my opinion, full authority over that, because it's how they win, how they market themselves.
B2B companies are real value-derived and driven. You have to deliver something to companies that they're going to make their money back on or save time on, and that's a different function. Anyway, yes, we do propose that's the way it should work.
Jamie Garverick: Yeah. But I'm curious. From my perspective, it seems like a very small percentage of traditional B2B technology companies operate that way.
Warren Zenna: 40%.
Jamie Garverick: Oh, really? I would have guessed it would have been lower.
Warren Zenna: No, it was. When I first started doing this in 2019, it was around 10%. Now it's about 40. [00:53:00]
Jamie Garverick: Okay. Interesting. So it's increasing.
Warren Zenna: Yeah. And in that 40, it's like they say, 50% of marriages are miserable, and the other 50%... 50% will fail. And then someone also goes, "Yeah, but half of the 50% that didn't fail are still miserable," you know?
So it's sort of the same thing. That 40% isn't perfect. It's aspirationally 40% of businesses who understand this and agree with it, and that's what they're aspiring to do. They may not be executing it well, but that's what they want. At least they're on the same page, but they're trying to figure it out.
Then among that 40, I'd say probably 20% are really doing it great. We have a lot of CROs in our network who are working at companies, and this is how they run things, and
Jamie Garverick: Okay. Interesting. [00:54:00]
Warren Zenna: Great. Yeah.
Jamie Garverick: Interesting.
Warren Zenna: So, your thoughts on that? I'm just curious what it's like in your world.
Jamie Garverick: Yeah. As I think through my experience, in the last couple of companies I've been at, we've had some CMO turnover. So I kind of temporarily inherit or have ownership over the demand
gen,
Warren Zenna: Yeah.
Jamie Garverick: The full marketing, not brand and comms, but just demand gen.
I think it's interesting. I see your point, and I think it does make sense. It also gets rid of the finger-pointing, right? The classic celebrating that they've overachieved against their pipeline goals. Meanwhile—
Warren Zenna: The political intrigue, the warfare, which takes up time and doesn't really do anything. We do a lot of this, right? The things we see are the obvious stuff, like the departments don't know what each other's doing. Sales hates the leads marketing gives them, and marketing's pissed off that sales can't close them. All the normal stuff. [00:55:00]
Then it gets more complicated. No one really knows how efficient the handoffs are between these departments, and we find out, we do analysis, and you're losing on average $2 or $3 million a year on the handoff across these departments, sometimes more. It's just leaking, leaving the business.
And no one's accounting for it. There's a weird attitude where, faced with the idea of doing things the way we propose, they'd rather have those leaks. It's really bizarre. It's like, "Yeah, it's really disruptive. I don't want to do that." And there are a lot of people you have to upset, or...
And the reality is, I get it. You still fire people every once in a while, right? I'm not cruel. I'm simply saying we're working on a very antiquated management model that we've gotten very comfortable with, and it's not efficient. [00:56:00] It doesn't really work anymore.
If you're doing really good forensics and you can see the data we surface, our clients say, "We had no idea how inefficient this was. We knew it didn't work, because we hear people complaining, or morale is low, but we didn't realize it was costing us that much money, and we're losing that many customers."
The other problem that comes with this is that customer definition goes down. We don't even really know who we're supposed to be selling to. The people we're selling to are buying from us, but there's probably another ICP out there that would be better, and we haven't done the data to refine it, so we're missing the market.
And it's too hard to pivot into that new market when you have all those silos, because you have to move everybody over to a different sales motion, and you can't, so you just don't. That's a big one.
Jamie Garverick: Yeah. Huh. It's interesting, as you were talking about that, I was thinking through some of the disconnects, the dropped balls, just communication between sales and marketing. At a previous company we determined our ICP was a certain set of vertical industries, with tier one and tier two. [00:57:00]
If I recall, tier one was about three industries. Then I found out, literally through the grapevine, and by the way, it wasn't a very big company at the time, that marketing was prioritizing a different set of industries and verticals. Which is kind of embarrassing, because again, it wasn't a very big company at the time.
You're like, "How in the hell does that happen?"
Warren Zenna: Yeah, that's right. It happens because of what you've already identified, which is that there isn't any one entity responsible for looking at it, right? You're thinking, "Well, someone must be doing that," or, "Someone else must be doing [00:58:00] that." There's no way to have a unified dashboard where you're surfacing this stuff cleanly, so you can go, "All right, this is true."
It's not three different opinions. It's the roll-up. Making that part of the operating system is what matters. You and I both know that ICP enrichment is an ongoing thing. You're always looking at your customer base. It changes. The buyer changes, the market changes, the metrics change, the way people buy changes, the way people pay changes, pricing changes, the market shifts, anything.
So that should be in there. Another one should be net revenue retention. That's the number. That's the CRO's goal. That's the whole thing. Everything that leads up to net revenue retention, in my opinion, should be how a CRO is paid.
Jamie Garverick: So North Star metric.
Warren Zenna: That's it, right? If you can do that, it raises all ships. We could easily make a proclamation that if we keep our customers and their net revenue continues to go up, the customers are getting value. We're serving their needs, they continue to buy, and they expand more. [00:59:00]
So the company begins to lean toward putting people into the customer bucket, as opposed to the acquisition bucket, because it's a better place to put them, right? So all of a sudden everyone operates differently toward that goal, as opposed to, "Let's just get more customers."
Let's get the right ones that fit into the net revenue retention bucket, because when they get there, it costs us less money to make it profitable. You don't see that happening a lot, because I don't think there's a lot of control over the way the company is being measured. I believe there are too many people with opinions about what should be measured, or how.
Jamie Garverick: Yeah, that's true. And then, obviously, you get measurement sprawl, right? "Oh, let's go measure this now. Let's go measure this now." Then all of a sudden your dashboard has 50 things on it. [01:00:00]
Warren Zenna: Yeah. Simple. Simple is easier, you know? Do you have a RevOps person on your team?
Jamie Garverick: I do. Yeah.
Warren Zenna: Great. And I'm curious, what's the relationship you have with your CFO?
Jamie Garverick: It's a good relationship. It's a collaborative relationship. There's good, healthy tension when there needs to be healthy tension. He's doing his job, I'm doing my job, and sometimes those things can be in conflict with each other.
But it's a good relationship.
Warren Zenna: And do you have a board? Are you PE-backed? What's your financial backing?
Jamie Garverick: So, venture capital backed, or our main investors are Microsoft, Salesforce, Google, and Lightspeed.
Warren Zenna: Okay. Mm-hmm. And do you report to the board yourself? Are you... [01:01:00]
Jamie Garverick: I report to the CEO. CEO and founder, yeah.
Warren Zenna: But when you have board meetings, are you presenting to the board, or...? Gotcha. Got it. Good.
Jamie Garverick: Quarterly board meetings.
Yeah.
Warren Zenna: You're the man. That's great.
Jamie Garverick: Yeah, exactly.
Warren Zenna: I get it. I do. Well, very cool. So, again, I threw that at you mainly because it's interesting to get your perspective on the role.
So if you were talking to somebody, and a lot of people listening to this podcast are either new to the role or they're in it, and over time they've told me I sort of read their minds a bit sometimes. What would you say is the success formula for someone in a revenue leadership position today?
What would you generally advise somebody who's exploring moving from a functional leadership role to a chief role, the chief revenue officer role? [01:02:00]
Jamie Garverick: I'd make sure they fully understand the role and what's expected. There are a lot of great first-line and second-line sales leaders who would have a challenging time in a CRO role, because it's just a different set of responsibilities and expectations.
Sometimes it's just a matter of, "Oh, I actually don't want to do that job." So I think making sure they fully understand it...
Warren Zenna: And that they want it.
Jamie Garverick: And that they want it, right? You really have to want it, because it's a tough job.
Warren Zenna: It is.
Jamie Garverick: It is a tough job. So understand the role and the expectations, and just like anything else, there are pluses and minuses to it.
I think that's really important. And for folks who are getting the CRO role for the first time, I'd definitely find a CRO mentor, someone who can help you. Obviously, I'm sure that person probably has a network they can lean on, and if not, their investors or their CEO can connect them with an experienced CRO to mentor them through the process. [01:03:00]
Because it's challenging the first time. There are just a lot of things you don't know because you haven't experienced them before.
Warren Zenna: Yep. We do a lot of that, by the way. We have a lot of clients we're mentoring through the role. I agree, you need someone, because it's a lonely role. You need someone to talk to about it. If you're in your own company, you're not going to talk to your boss about anything.
Jamie Garverick: It's a lonely
Warren Zenna: No way. You've got to go get it somewhere else. Let's say, on the other hand, before I let you go, one more question. You're a CEO, and you're going to hire your first CRO. What would you look for in that person that would identify they're the right person to do that job successfully?
And how would you advise a founder or CEO to support their CRO to succeed?
Jamie Garverick: I'll caveat by saying it depends on stage and type of
Warren Zenna: Okay, let's say it's a, you know, over $30 million business, between $30 and $150 million, that range, just so I give you more parameters.
Jamie Garverick: Yeah. I'd look for a CRO who has a track record, not only in the role, but throughout their career. Someone who's consistently overachieved and has a successful track record at each of those levels in their career. [01:04:00] That's important.
There are some intangibles. The CEO-CRO relationship has to be really good and really strong. It has to be based on trust, and trust takes time to build. So during the interview process, you're probably not going to completely build trust, but the CEO has to feel very comfortable with that person, because there are going to be a lot of challenging times and hard conversations, and you want to make sure you're having them from a place of trust.
When trust is built, people feel comfortable having direct conversations that are productive. So the chemistry between the CEO and CRO is really important, though it's an intangible thing that's hard to measure. I'd look for resiliency, especially today.
I've been doing this for a while. There were certain periods in my career where it was easier than others, so I'd really interview for resiliency. There are a number of ways you can do that. Talk to me about the hardest part, the hardest time in your career. [01:05:00]
It could also be a personal thing. Maybe there's something personal. Talk to me about what that was and how you overcame it. Resiliency is really, really important. Other things, certainly, since the start of cloud software, and even further now with AI, you need someone who has a kind of RevOps feel to them.
Meaning they understand the systems, the process, and the metrics. They like to get into the weeds on that type of stuff. It's not just some cowboy slinging software. They know how to build a playbook and build repeatable processes based on systems, metrics, and processes.
So that kind of RevOps feel to the CRO. Those are some of the most important things. What about you? What do you think?
Warren Zenna: So, I agree with a couple of things you said really strongly. One is that the relationship with your CEO is the most important relationship you have as a CRO. If you don't have a good relationship with the CEO, it's going to be very difficult. And when I say good relationship, I don't mean you get along and can slap each other on the back, but that you're really aligned on a couple of things. [01:06:00]
You're aligned on what the job is. You agree with them, with him or her, on what you do, the scope of it, how it's compensated, the authorities you have, the autonomy you have, the resources you have, the amount of runway you have. Those things all have to be really clear, and if they're not, what happens is the relationship quickly starts to go off the rails, in a slow way, not a fast way.
Then all of a sudden, six months later, the person is sitting next to the role they thought they were going to have, and they're like, "How did I get here?" The other one is, given the nature of the way we see the role being successful, and this is interesting, leaders tend to look at sales leaders for this role almost exclusively.
When we first started doing this, they'd only look at a sales leader to be a CRO. Now it's getting different. We're seeing RevOps leaders who are really good for this job, [01:07:00]
Jamie Garverick: Yeah.
Warren Zenna: Okay. And more of them. Here's why I think there's a benefit to that. As you and I both know, and you're probably guilty of this as I am, I know I can sell, I can build sales, and I can always get new business.
So if I'm a CRO and things feel wonky to me, I'm going to fall back on that, because I know I can, and no one's going to be mad at me because I got new customers. But if I fall back on that strength, I've turned myself into a head of sales, and I've allowed my strengths to take me to a place away from the more important, longer-term goals of the business.
This happens a lot. A good CRO understands that and has the discipline to stay focused on net revenue retention type metrics, and hires an amazing, competent head of sales they can lead, so they remove their ability to fall into that trap, because they've placed somebody in that job who'll do it for them.
Jamie Garverick: Yeah, I think you're exactly right. You were talking about scope of role earlier. I think one of the questions the CEO has to ask themselves, and the CRO candidate too, is whether they're looking to hire a first-line sales leader and a super AE, or to hire someone who's going to build and scale out [01:08:00]
Warren Zenna: That's right. That's exactly right. And the thing is, what we hear, just to give you our feedback on that, we see too often, almost all the time, not every time but most of the time, that the company doesn't really know. They kind of want both. That's a problem. Where things go off the rails pretty quickly is when the CRO says yes too soon.
Because the other thing the CRO needs to do when they're thinking about this is think about the discipline of making sure the environment is right for them before they accept the role, and not hope and pray that they accept one that's less suitable and that it'll work out, because it usually won't.
Jamie Garverick: T-t-tell me more about that.
What do you mean by
Warren Zenna: Yeah, yeah. Here's what I mean. We have this analogy I get made fun of for a lot, but I'll say it. You go to the zoo. For a couple of decades it was a big thing, because pandas are really rare, and when you went to the zoo you always wanted to go to the panda [01:09:00] exhibit, because, cool, a panda.
These are really rare, cute creatures. You go to the panda exhibit, and they're really boring. They just don't do anything. They sit there for an hour.
Jamie Garverick: Yeah, they don't move.
Warren Zenna: And you're watching, like, "What are they going to do?" And then the zookeepers are like, "These are problematic creatures. They don't reproduce. It's really hard to get them to have babies. They don't do it. They don't eat well." [01:10:00] They just don't do well, and they're like, "These are really messed-up animals." So the perception people have is that these are dysfunctional animals. But it's not the animal, it's the environment. They don't do well in captivity. That's just not a place for them.
If you go see pandas in China, they're running around, having kids, eating, going to dinner. They're going to McDonald's. They do everything. They thrive in their natural environment, and CROs are very similar. If they're not in the right environment, they don't do well, and you need to know what the environment is.
The environment is one where, as I mentioned, you need clarity of your role and your position. You need scope clarity, authority clarity, and you also need to know the compensation strategy. What am I being paid to do? If the compensation is incentivizing me to do something that's off purpose, that environment is not going to be good for me, because I'm going to be forced to do something that doesn't suit me well.
So if you go in knowing that, you can design it that way, or find out that you're not going to be in an environment where you can thrive, and you should go find a [01:11:00]
Jamie Garverick: Yeah, go do something else.
Jamie Garverick: Agree. Interesting. Thanks for sharing that.
Warren Zenna: Yeah. So anyway, look, it was great. I kept you over time here because we were talking so much, and I appreciate it. It was a great conversation.
Jamie Garverick: Yeah, I enjoyed it. I appreciate you having me on the show.
[01:12:00]