Enterprise Revenue Models and AI-Driven Efficient Growth with Justin Shriber

In this episode of CRO Spotlight, host Warren Zenna welcomes Justin Shriber, CEO of BoostUp.ai, for a deep dive into the evolution of sales technology and enterprise revenue strategies. Justin recounts his journey from early days at Siebel to his leadership roles at Oracle and BoostUp.ai, sharing insights on how traditional models are being reimagined for today’s dynamic market.

Justin explains how shifting customer expectations and new revenue models demand more than legacy CRM systems. He outlines how AI agents can analyze critical signals, automate follow-up actions, and streamline the sales process. This discussion emphasizes the importance of focusing on a singular customer value to drive sustainable, long-term growth.

The conversation also examines the evolving role of marketing and the challenges of revenue attribution. Justin describes how integrating automated systems with human expertise not only reduces non-actionable tasks but also enhances overall productivity. The dialogue reveals how a refined focus on customer outcomes can transform both sales and marketing strategies.

Throughout the interview, Warren and Justin debate the balance between short-term targets and strategic, sustainable growth. They discuss how modern AI tools can dissolve inefficiencies in sales operations, align investor expectations, and create a frictionless process that empowers teams. Listeners gain a nuanced perspective on using innovative technology to drive efficient growth in a competitive landscape.

What is The CRO Spotlight Podcast?

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.

Speaker 1: 00:11

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 BDD 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.

Speaker 1: 00:45

Thanks for listening. Now let's go mix it

Speaker 2: 00:47

up. You

Speaker 3: 00:51

said just before you're not a founder, you're a CEO. So that kind of indicates to me that there's some interesting history of the organization, how you got involved in it. So I'd love to hear a bit about that and sort of a little history of like where you're at and how you got into BoostUp and what BoostUp is and how long into it you are and where you're at right now from a growth and go to market perspective.

Speaker 2: 01:12

Sure. Well, I'll start with a little background on myself. Got a long sales. At a business school, I actually joined Siebel. So the, I guess, the original CRM company.

Speaker 3: 01:22

That's right.

Speaker 2: 01:23

Very strong sales culture. Tom himself was the consummate salesman and really built a culture around that. I came into Siebel as a product manager. And so I was building the products and found myself getting pulled into sales calls and representing the product. I'd really enjoyed talking to customers and bridging with their needs.

Speaker 2: 01:46

I'd been in consulting before, so that was something that I had a lot of experience with. And I actually found myself in an interesting position when I moved formally to sales. I was now selling the products that I built, so I couldn't actually cuss out the the product team that had built it. But, I guess that's turnabout is fair fair play.

Speaker 3: 02:07

Yeah. For sure.

Speaker 2: 02:08

And I I rose up to the ranks at Oracle when they purchased Siebel and eventually ran their North American sales team that was selling our on demand products. So we were competing against Salesforce. So I really had a firsthand experience, not only building the tech that salespeople use, but also selling. This was B2B large accounts. Oracle's a great environment, so I feel like I had an incredible training, if you will, in how real B2B sales is done.

Speaker 3: 02:38

Okay. And so then BoostUp, how did that happen?

Speaker 2: 02:42

Yeah, I spent some time at smaller companies. I was at LinkedIn for a while responsible for the Sales Navigator product, but also jumped into startups all related to either AI or sales tech. And I had some connections to the board at BoostUp. I was really excited with what BoostUp was doing. I felt like they were taking an innovative approach to revenue management, specifically in the category of forecasting and also deal execution.

Speaker 2: 03:11

And when they mentioned that they were looking for someone to take the helm of a product that had been developed but now needed some go to market chops, I felt like there was a great fit for my skill set and also for my interest level. And just really quickly on BoostUp, what we do is we, we focus on helping CROs achieve efficient growth. You know, up until the year February, it was all about growth at any cost. I think the tide changed, now while the CEO continues to demand high rates of growth, the CFO is saying, yeah, but we can't give you resources that are in line with the growth we're looking for, figure out how to bring more productivity out of your team. And so we deploy a series of agents that help you to forecast more accurately and also get into the deals with reps and actually take action with the reps to save them time and improve outcomes.

Speaker 3: 04:05

Got it. So you were brought in as a CEO after what? Like there was already one that was a founder and you sort of took over? Yeah, was

Speaker 2: 04:13

founder who's an excellent product person, built a great platform. And when I came in, was some pretty good traction with customers. But what the board was looking for was really to scale the organization. So how do you build that go to market machine that is able to consistently build pipeline and close large transactions on a regular basis? And given my background in both sales and marketing, I was a pretty good fit for that.

Speaker 2: 04:40

We looked at what was going into the marketplace and realized there was a lane, if you will, among complicated customers that had nuanced revenue needs, our platform was uniquely seeded to address that. So we really focused on targeting that ICP. I think it's a great example of when you get very focused and prioritized on a segment and you build your go to market engine around that, great things happen. In addition to that, our ASP increased over the course of a year by about 300%. And that was a reflection of the fact that we were going after a larger customer.

Speaker 3: 05:18

So when you first got in there, you had to do some enriching of your ICP identification, assume you probably had to get to the point where you got that clear. Was it a little bit more expansive at that point? Was it a little fuzzy at that point? Like how did you determine that your enterprise was the right sort of model for you? Did you already know that when you took the job or did you figure that out?

Speaker 2: 05:40

I think that it's a function of looking at the unique differentiation we brought to market and where that met the the audiences that we could potentially go after. So from a unique capabilities perspective, you know, one observation I have being in CRM for twenty five years now, Siebel was built at a time when there was really only one flavor of revenue. Salesperson came out, they closed the contract for a fixed amount of money, bolted maintenance on, that was non negotiable, and then you're off to the next deal. Salesforce, their great innovation obviously was taking what Siebel had built and put it into the cloud, But that infrastructure again assumed that you were going to have that one flavor of revenue. Well, since then, revenue models have evolved.

Speaker 2: 06:28

You continue to have a fixed price contract. Back then it was on prem, then it became SaaS. Today though, you've got consumption based, you've got outcome based. The renewal and expansion teams actually control more revenue than the new logo teams. Every one of those new revenue models introduces a new dimension to how you operate.

Speaker 2: 06:49

And the original CRM platforms just weren't built to handle that kind of technology. I'll give you two examples. Number one, most of the revenue data now that companies manage doesn't live in CRM. It lives in a data warehouse. It lives in proprietary systems monitoring usage.

Speaker 2: 07:07

It lives in, customer success systems to man manage, customer sat. That's a problem if you're trying to manage everything out of CRM. Number two, the way that companies wanna view data, the way they wanna roll it up is getting very complicated. Again, going back to the Salesforce Siebel days, you rolled up data by the sales team. I have a VP and a director and AEs on the front line.

Speaker 2: 07:34

Today though, I might wanna go in and if I'm MongoDB, which is one of our customers, what I really wanna know is for a given account, how many projects have we deployed? How many accounts does a rep own? And then from there, roll that rep up in the hierarchy. So what you end up getting is a lot of different nodes in that hierarchy of the rollup. They just didn't exist originally in CRM.

Speaker 2: 07:58

All of these different dimensions kind of break the old model. And so what I realized at BoostUp is we had a very powerful technology that could address the needs of enterprises running these new revenue models. And that's then when we said, okay, how can we define an ICP around that? What we learned is that there is a particular set of sub verticals that really value this. Infrastructure as a service, for example.

Speaker 2: 08:25

Consumption based heavy. Most tech has a renewal expansion team. We've got some unique differentiators around that. And then the other thing is the size. How much revenue are they generating?

Speaker 2: 08:36

When you get into 500,000,000 and above in revenue, that's a really complicated operations that you're running. You've got to have multiple people focusing on it, building the strategy, building up the operation. So we were basically able to just systematically go through and identify segment the ICP that we were going after. And then from there, was pretty straightforward to target that with the right message.

Speaker 3: 09:00

Got it. So in terms of your leadership structure, how do you have your revenue operations set up leadership wise? Do you have a CRO, a CMO, a CSO? Like what's the way that you have that team currently set up?

Speaker 2: 09:14

Yeah, so we've got a CRO and we've got a CMO, and then we've actually embraced the RevOps model rather than a SalesOps, MarketingOps model. My experience is that's becoming more and more prevalent as companies realize that there is a really tight interlock between sales and marketing, particularly when you get into motions like PLG, where you don't have a formal sales team, the marketing team now is really driving a lot of that revenue, or you've got an interesting transition where maybe someone will come in on PLG, which is driven by the product team or the marketing team, and then that gets handed off to the sales team to close that customer on an enterprise contract. What I love about the fact that you've got a centralized DevOps team, they've got visibility across all functions, and they're not artificially bifurcating it. The other interesting model that we're starting to look at, and I've seen this more and more, is the go to market strategy role, where you've got someone that can pull back from the systems a little bit and think more broadly about how the go to market function is being architected. What is the frictionless process that we want to achieve and how do we create that?

Speaker 2: 10:29

And then from there you can bring in other RevOps folks to build the processes and the systems that support that.

Speaker 3: 10:36

So how would that look hierarchically? So if you had this go to market strategist, would it be someone whom would roll up directly to you, would the CRO and CMO report into that person, like what's the way that you see sort of like a line around how that's organised?

Speaker 2: 10:52

Yeah, typically see it roll up to either the CRO or the RevOps person, and really it comes down to personalities involved. If you've got a head of rev ops that can wear that strategy hat, then they're very comfortable bringing in a dedicated specialist and engaging with that. On the other hand, if they're more of an operational analytical type, the CRO may want to bring that directly underneath him or her in order to have that as an independent party that can interface as a peer with the RevOps team.

Speaker 3: 11:24

Mhmm. I asked the question because, as you know, one of the core tenants of our platform is the idea that the CRO is that person, right? It's someone who runs revenue and has ownership of the entire to your point, right, to kind of build a bit more of a orchestrated and converged revenue operation as opposed to a siloed one, which is I know you know, if you're a sales and marketing guy like I am, how quickly that can happen. Right? And there's all sorts of ways to tether those things together.

Speaker 3: 11:57

I've seen models where there's some collaborative internal SLAs with the CMO and the CRO, how they operate together and agreements and discovery processes and information sharing and some tech to tie it together. My premise in this, I just want to kind of maybe debate this a bit or just chat and get your point of view on it, that all those things in my view are trying to fix a problem that can more easily fix it was the C suite was organized differently, right? So instead of having all these silos that you have to tie together, why not remove them and have someone oversee the whole thing and have more subject matter experts? So you have a head of marketing, a head of sales, someone who runs customer and someone who runs rev ops report into a chief revenue officer who creates more of a larger go to market strategy and orchestrates the way in which all those three things are running. And it removes the silos and some of the political protective that go protectiveness that goes on between these different groups.

Speaker 3: 12:49

And it also removes the need to have create different types of technologies that I'm seeing being used today to kind of tether together different groups. In my opinion, because I do this a lot, is accommodating maybe people's sensitivities around having their roles being mitigated or somehow micromanaged or maybe even a bit marginalized. We're sort of in the midst of what I think you're correct. I think the go to market and the CRO are sort of battling for control over what I think is more of a unified go to market strategy. So to that end, I mean, what are your thoughts on the idea of having that sort of structure that would then, in my view, maybe almost accomplish exactly what you just said, but removing some of the, I guess, powers and some of the silos that come with C suite executives running organizations.

Speaker 2: 13:39

Well, I think that the interesting the interesting dynamic here is that historically sales has been traditional sales, which we would define as the direct sales team, new logo acquisition team. They've really been the team that's been defined as the revenue team. Now though, you've got every organisation to some degree as a revenue team. The product team, if they own PLG, suddenly they're the revenue success team, if they own renewals and expansions, suddenly they're the revenue team.

Speaker 3: 14:17

One hundred percent, yes.

Speaker 2: 14:19

And so I think part of it is breaking down historical silos. I think part of it though is we've just started to ask every organisation to transition from being a cost centre to being a revenue center. And once you start to ask each organization to play that role, you've got to have some point at which everything comes together. Yep. The CEO is probably not the right place because the CEO has broader responsibilities as well.

Speaker 2: 14:43

But pushing it down to any one of those functions doesn't make sense either. I like the CRO, and I think the CRO function needs to be redefined from, as you said, simply the new logo, direct sales team to the person that oversees anything that touches revenue and has the power to weave all of those together.

Speaker 3: 15:03

A %. That's exactly right. I'm an advocate for that. So I started this business, was to solve that problem. You articulated it very nicely there, which is this revenue focused operation is a much smarter way to ensure that all the revenue functions, as we'll call them, have attribution to the bottom line as opposed to being cost centers.

Speaker 3: 15:29

I think the the interesting pushback I get on this, and it's obviously you could probably imagine it comes from a lot of CMOs who are threatened by this whole conversation. But, you know, this is a weird kind of thing. I think the CMO role, you know, and I have a lot of I have my own marketing agency, so I have no lack of love for the marketing business at all. I come from that side of the business, frankly, and sell selling marketing most of my career. So this isn't some sort of like a, you know, issue I have with marketing at all.

Speaker 3: 15:58

It's more to do with just looking at functions and systems, right? So marketing organizations have traditionally because they're not attached to revenue, they're very threatened all the time of having their job taken away or their budget taken away when people can't afford things. It's usually the first place they pull things. I don't think that's right. That just tends to be the case because to your point, if marketing is looked at as a cost center, that cost will be cut because they're going to stick to revenue.

Speaker 3: 16:22

And I think the way in which we transform a marketing function into a revenue function is by having it tied to revenue, which I know you and I both know how to do that. And once you do that, marketing becomes a lot more secure. So in fact, I think CMOs in a way are weirdly holding on to their turf and making their jobs less secure. If they got themselves more into inculcated with everybody, they may give up their C suite title, but they'd gain a lot more power in being able to attribute the value that they're doing on a day to day basis. That's sort of like what I think is important because as you said before, marketing is playing even much more of a greater role in getting customers than it did before, you know, in terms of not only the way we market and the way we put products in front of people.

Speaker 3: 17:05

And we can get people to go right to a product page and sign up for something in a marketing can be almost completely 100% responsible for that. And I think that the more we're seeing this, the more we're seeing like how maybe the older model of having all these C suite executives is no longer really working, particularly as you said earlier, because of this whole growth at all cost model is out the window these days. We need to really start making more money. It's leaner, it's smarter. So to that end, I think we're in agreement.

Speaker 3: 17:28

Is that something that you're playing around with

Speaker 2: 17:31

right Let me just make one comment though about what you said. Having worn both hats, I've run sales organizations, I've also been a CMO a couple of times. The challenge with the CMO role to date has been that the marketing organization typically is a few steps removed from revenue, And it's very hard to directly attribute that revenue to marketing because there are multiple factors that are gonna play into whether or not you close the revenue. The savvy marketers will always try to attach themselves to revenue, but to some extent, they're hamstrung because of the technology that is in place, which has limitations. And the the second thing that hamstrings them is most CEOs don't speak marketing.

Speaker 3: 18:15

Yep.

Speaker 2: 18:16

And so as marketers try to talk about the nuances of the business, what's going well, what's not going well, most of that is going over the heads of the CEO. I think that in response to that, there's a couple of things marketers can do. First of all, we're in a new world in terms of technology that's available. The holy grail is attribution, multi touch attribution from a marketing perspective. That's always been a science project.

Speaker 2: 18:40

I think AI changes that and gives us a much more sophisticated way to correlate behaviour and action to revenue outcomes. So I think the best marketers now are starting to embrace those technologies. And then to the point about the CEO not speaking marketing, I think that marketers need to invest more time with their CEOs in educating them, but they need to attach to the things that the CEO cares about. So start from the vantage point of the CEO. What is their world?

Speaker 2: 19:09

Get inside of their head, and then help them to understand a little bit what's going on. I think those two things are going to help. But then to your point, it still needs to be from an organizational perspective brought together at one point. And I I like the CRO a lot to do that.

Speaker 3: 19:24

I I agree with everything you said. I I do think there's a knowledge gap there. I think marketing is still looked at like a bit like voodoo in a weird way. It's interesting, as I mentioned before, have a marketing agency and we do all organic marketing, which is a much more sophisticated thing because it's not like you just spend dollars and you get clicks. It's a whole different way of operating.

Speaker 3: 19:43

And we have a difficult time sometimes communicating to our clients with the CEOs of the companies like what the value of what we do is. Because everybody wants to know, to your point, I think attribution is sort of like a curse word in some respects because if you can't attribute something, it doesn't get done, but that doesn't mean it's not doing you any good. So I think, like, you know, you look at branding, for example. It's really hard to put attribution to branding. It's it's not easy to do, but it needs to be done.

Speaker 3: 20:05

You know, you can't not have a brand, and you can't not have a value proposition. There's a lot of ethereal aspects to marketing that I think are critically important, not not just things like, you know, driving traffic or, you know, knowing how people, you know, navigate around through the various channels and make decisions. And so, you know, the conversation was around them considering the idea of maybe abandoning the idea of doing any organic because they certainly couldn't get their arms around the attribution of it. So they were thinking about not doing it anymore. Well, they were sort of hinting at it.

Speaker 3: 20:40

But they wouldn't. Right. So I asked them like, what it is, what is it that is you're reluctant to not do it? Like, why won't you just cut this budget? And he really couldn't answer, you know?

Speaker 3: 20:51

And I said, well, there's got to be a reason. There's some reason you're spending money on this. You know, like, so if I were to say we quit and we're not doing this anymore, what would you be losing right now? And he realized in that moment that he would be losing a lot. He was able to say, you know, we really do need people to know who we are.

Speaker 3: 21:11

We really do need to be on the top page of Google. We really do need to get our content out there. We really do need to educate people. I don't know what it does, but we can't stop doing it. In fact, I think he was able to come around and see it's probably more important than he even realized at what he thought about it as being removed from the system.

Speaker 3: 21:31

It was able to have him articulated better. And that's part of the problem. Everyone's looking at everything from an attribution perspective. It seems like it doesn't matter. And I think the marketers need to do also a good job of just sort of explaining that, you know, marketing is, you know, it's a science and it's become maybe in my view, be a bit too much of a science, But it's really a very creative psychological thing that you can't ignore its value and how much it plays a role in.

Speaker 3: 21:58

Just because we can't measure it or attribute it, you can't kill it. It's too important. In fact, I think you need to double down on it. I don't know. You have a category you're in, right?

Speaker 3: 22:09

There's competitors in your set. How do you look at that perspective? And, you know, you're looking at, you know, boost up. How do you sort of go to market with why are we different from the alternatives or substitutes tos that you may have out there?

Speaker 2: 22:24

Well, I think that it it sales tech has always been a crowded space. Yep. And the way that you break through, I think, ultimately, you credentialize yourself with your users, your customers and the end users, to the extent that they're willing to stand up and say, we use this, we actually get value out of it. That's a powerful message. And it can't, you know, it's not, you can't counterfeit that message.

Speaker 2: 22:50

So one of the things that we really focus on is number one, just building value for our customers. But then number two, working with our customers as influencers, as we continue to build our base. And there's a nice virtuous cycle there where the more happy customers you bring on, the more influences you get and the broader that organic word grows, which ultimately drives the marketing initiatives. Now, sure, you need to do all of the stuff, the paid advertising and the SEO optimization. However, it's a small world out there.

Speaker 2: 23:27

And more and more, I think people are turning to their peers for validation and for ideas about which vendors to work with and how to approach certain problems.

Speaker 3: 23:37

Yeah, I agree. I think if you can focus on making the customer happy to the point where they become an advocate, that's the goal, right? What you want them. You want your customers to become your Salesforce, so to speak. And I don't think, at least in my world, the clients I work with have lost touch with the customer as the focus, right?

Speaker 3: 24:00

It's always about getting new logos as the focus or getting our hitting our number as the focus. And you know, when are you guys? I'm sure this is actually be helpful for me to know. Are you you have outside funding or are you organically grown? Like How are you being managed in that respect?

Speaker 3: 24:16

We have outside funding. Got it. Because we encounter this issue, which I don't know, it'd be interesting to hear your perspective on this in terms of how it's being run at you. But a lot of times we have clients we speak to whom, They because they have funding from an entity, whether it be a PE or VC, you know there's there's a stakeholder there. Usually it's a board and other people who have now you know have a stake in in the outcome of the company and they it comes with opinions and it comes with expectations and it comes with you know timelines, which many times are driven in cycles that can seem like short term, right?

Speaker 3: 24:53

I mean, we have to drive outcomes. We have to create calendars. We have to say, this done this month and get this done this quarter. I understand the need for having a book ending things. But CROs in particular in the way that you and I have talked about them are under pressure to try and build longer term strategic growth, right, while at the same time handling the immediate needs of those outcomes.

Speaker 3: 25:15

Those things sometimes don't match up, particularly if the tactics that are required for us to make our number force us to do things that may not be in the best interest of our prospect. We do them anyway because we need to get the business. How do you manage those things? What's the way in which you figured out how to deal with short term goals, but also make sure that you're taking care of the marketplace by not pissing them off by overbearing with messaging to try and close deals?

Speaker 2: 25:39

Yeah. That's the classic question. I actually have a mantra that priority is a powerful war powerful word until you add an s to the end of it. And, it's so tempting. I I do it all the time myself.

Speaker 2: 25:57

I think it starts with asking what is that priority singular, and how do you build the organ, mobilize the organization around it? If you get that question right, amazing things happen. On the other hand, if you try to spread yourself too thinly, it's just it's just total chaos. I guess priority in my experience always needs to come back to customer value. If you're truly delivering a product that creates value in a way that's frictionless, that compensates for a lot of ills.

Speaker 2: 26:27

And so backing into that, what is the unique customer value that we can create? How can we actually create the frictionless experience to be able to realize that? And then let's build all of our go to market around that, our customer support and delivery, and our product organization. I was just on a call today where we were working on a new PLG motion, and it was getting pretty intense. There were a lot of opinions and perspectives.

Speaker 2: 26:56

And I remember I said, guys, the priority here is we want the end user to say, that thing just blew me away as fast as possible. And it's interesting because when I put that question on the table, it suddenly brought clarity to a lot of these questions. And we were able to say, don't worry about that. That's not important. Yeah, we need to we need to focus on that.

Speaker 2: 27:19

So I would say Be clear on what the priority singular is and then solve from there.

Speaker 3: 27:26

Yeah, so I get it. Like when you have too many things or too many targets, there's no way to focus the organization around one thing. It's almost like distilling down what's the one event that we know we want to create that we know if we do that event consistently, it will trickle down into solving all the other things that we want. And I happen to agree that in the final analysis, I would say, I bet that in any company, if they did that analysis effectively, it would come down to some customer outcome. That would be probably where it would live.

Speaker 3: 28:00

Wouldn't be like, well, we need eight more customers every month. I just can't imagine that being the right priority for a company, frankly. So It would probably satisfy someone's priority. Right? I don't think that that's a good one.

Speaker 3: 28:10

I think it's like And

Speaker 2: 28:11

that gets a little short term. I could come up with a lot of great ways to get eight new customers in the short term, but what you want is sustainable revenue over time. And again, to do that, you've got to be generating value that customers understand and recognize. So maybe it's not eight customers in the short term, but it's 200 customers over the next three years.

Speaker 3: 28:30

Yeah. That's a great one. That gives you time to be able to build up a relationship and build the right kind of dynamic with people. What kind of relationship do you have with the financing organization? Is it collaborative?

Speaker 3: 28:43

Do you find that they're not putting pressure on you? Do you find yourself in a situation where 're battling with figuring out how to serve two masters, which is I want my customers to be happy, but I want my investors to be happy. And more like getting into your head a little bit from a leadership perspective and how you deal with that.

Speaker 2: 29:00

Well, I think that there are different profiles of investors there's no one answer. For sure. Depending on where you are in the stage of your company, not only do you need investment, but you also need a certain kind of money. Some money is going to come in with the requirements that you operate in a certain way. For example, when PE takes over companies, some PE firms have a very stringent set of processes that they run, and they're doing that to unlock specific value.

Speaker 2: 29:34

Other money comes in, and there's a much broader range that it's given to the leadership team because it's early stage, they're still exploring products, they need that level of scope. And in that case, the board is going to be providing advice, input, connections, and relationships. I've had nothing but a great experience with the investors that we've got. A couple of things where they really add value. Number one is they bring a point of view and perspective on what's going on in the market.

Speaker 2: 30:04

They're obviously very deep across a number of different companies and how they're operating. We're at a point right now in the world where business models are getting upended. AI is completely transforming not only the products that are delivered, but how we're delivering them, specifically the efficiency with which we can deliver these products. An employee today is able to deliver significantly more revenue than they were before, simply because they've got AI tools that double, triple, quadruple the amount of impact that they're going to have. I love to talk to my board and say, hey, how are these other companies structured?

Speaker 2: 30:42

What are they doing? What are you seeing that's a difference between us and them? And they've got great insights and perspective on that. And then secondly, and this is, I think, typical of any board, good relationships that are able to get me connected to partners, other potential customers and prospects. That's my number one advice.

Speaker 2: 30:59

Your investors are not just a source of money, they're partners. And as is the case with all partners, you've got to be aligned philosophically on the job that needs to be done and the roles that need to be brought into that.

Speaker 3: 31:14

That's good advice. I agree. You know, I see both. You know, I see some great relationships where the investors bring incredible value, and I see others work and be a little contentious. I was involved in both.

Speaker 3: 31:25

You know, I worked for a company where we had investors that were like it was it was horrible. You know, like, what they wanted us to do was had nothing to do with the business at all, but, know, they wanted their money back pretty quickly, and that was what they needed. And we sorta had to go into lockstep around that. Any event. So I guess I'll be able to more like if you don't mind talking a bit about your offering.

Speaker 3: 31:45

I know you understand you're mostly enterprise. Just if you don't mind, if you're speaking to the customer, like what would you say distinctly, like in a sentence, the problem that solve for them?

Speaker 2: 31:56

Efficient growth.

Speaker 3: 31:57

Okay. So what how do you achieve that for them?

Speaker 2: 32:02

So the challenge with sales tech to date is it has become a system of record that primarily is used by leadership teams to keep a finger on the pulse of the business. At the end of the day, if you take a critical look, it's not really creating true productivity on the front line, meaning salespeople are closing more business because they have a certain set of tools at their disposal. We're focused on deploying a set of agents that actually, well, they do three things. Number one, I call it the three A's. They are analyzing key signals that are coming in from any customer revenue facing source.

Speaker 2: 32:42

Number two, they alert key stakeholders in terms of important events and moments in the business. And number three, they take action. So analyze, alert, and take action. Historically, you've had a system of record that humans can analyze, and it's up to humans to find out the notable moments and create the alerts. And then it's all been on the humans to take action.

Speaker 2: 33:07

Let me give you a couple of examples today though of what we can do. So first of all, how are customers going to get the job done? I like to say that most of the time sales process is a deal killer. I know that's kind of sacrilege. We all like to rally around sales process and we put so much time into it, but let's be honest about what happens with sales process.

Speaker 2: 33:29

First of all, you spend a lot of resources. Some people spend up to a half a million dollars bringing in a consulting firm. If that, maybe it's even more to define what the sales process is like. So it's a huge money sink. You then deploy a fleet of people to configure your systems to reflect the sales process.

Speaker 2: 33:45

You then enable the sales team, pull them out of the field in order to learn how to use the sales process. And then you go and ask the sales team to actually use the sales process, meaning manually update the fields that were created. That's what all of this work comes down to. I created 10 new fields, you got to fill them out, which is crazy. All of this sophisticated advanced thinking comes down to you need to fill out the fields.

Speaker 2: 34:10

Do reps fill out fields? No, you didn't hire people that are good at filling stuff out. You hired aggressive people that wanna be in front of customers, that love the pursuit. If you get information in the system, it's because the night before the QBR, they knew that they were gonna get asked the questions. So they're reconstructing from memory what happened and it becomes somewhere in between their wildest imagination and what actually happened.

Speaker 2: 34:35

So that's another problem is now you've got unreliable data that you're building strategies and plans on. The other problem is that no customer speaks medic. No matter how much you want them to speak medic, they have their own process. So we continue to try to go after this idea of getting a sales process automated, get people to use it. It's flawed from the start.

Speaker 2: 34:57

So one of the things our agent does is it simply gets on calls, it looks at your inbox, it analyzes all the information, and from that it finds out how buyers want to buy. If I ask you, hey Warren, how are we going to get this deal done? You're going to tell me. And so with the agent on the call, the agent can assemble a mutual action plan for me. You can tell me all the steps in the mutual action plan.

Speaker 2: 35:19

It also knows when things get done so it can check things off. It can write emails for me that say, here's my mutual action plan. What do you think about it? It can, update new steps as new information comes in, and it can start to do work like, hey, part of the thing is I need to get this meeting scheduled. The agent can schedule the meeting.

Speaker 2: 35:38

That's different because now the agent is actually doing things on behalf of the rep. Things the rep was never good at in the first place. Frees up time for the rep, gets you more credible information, and it actually helps you to follow a strategy that's going to compress the sales cycle and increase conversion rates. That's an example of efficient growth.

Speaker 3: 35:58

Got it. So you're essentially removing non actionable tasks from the sales process so that salespeople can do their jobs that they're really designed to do and get it done more efficiently.

Speaker 2: 36:15

Yeah. And there are even actionable tasks that we're removing and we're just saying, let the robots do that work. Yep. Yep. I mean, if I could come to you and say, Warren, you just got a free assistant that is super smart, and they'll do whatever you need them to do.

Speaker 2: 36:29

How much more productive would you be? That's that's what we're offering at scale. Now, this is not just an assistant. This is a specialized sale assistant that knows how to sell and knows how to take stuff off of your plate.

Speaker 3: 36:44

Would your platform potentially be transferable to marketing organizations?

Speaker 2: 36:51

Yeah, absolutely. As we talked about, the line between sales and marketing is blurring. So these agents are also able to help you identify ICP. They're helping you to target accounts that live within that ICP, to research those accounts and know what's relevant to them. And then a big part of it through generative AI is drafting the right content that's going to be relevant to that particular audience.

Speaker 2: 37:19

That's all stuff traditionally that we've associated with the top of the funnel, but a lot of that now can be automated.

Speaker 3: 37:26

That sounds great. And it's obviously it's BoostUp.ai. Now is it a is it people can just log on and buy it or is there a what's the process for becoming a customer at your organization?

Speaker 2: 37:39

Direct sales model. If you're interested, reach out. We'll get in touch with you and we're happy to take you through the solution within the context of what your business requirements are.

Speaker 3: 37:49

And what is your commercial model? Are you usage? Are you seats? What's the way that you charge?

Speaker 2: 37:54

It's got both. Some of our products like Call Intelligence is consumption based, so we only charge you based on the calls that are recorded. And then we've got a seat basis for the sales execution module.

Speaker 3: 38:10

Very good. All right. Well, this is really great. I really appreciate this conversation a lot and, your perspective is really helpful. So, I want to just thank you for taking the time to join me and, I'll be looking out for you.

Speaker 3: 38:23

I know we I had some conversations with your people in the past about, you know, possibly figuring out a way to, collaborate so we we can maybe have that conversation again. I think there's some opportunity there.

Speaker 2: 38:33

I love that. Well, Warren, it's been a great conversation. Thank you.

Speaker 1: 38:36

Thank you. Thank you very much. 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.

Speaker 1: 38:58

That's thecrocollective.com. And we look forward to having you join us next time.