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The Growth Wizards Podcast is the playbook for B2B GTM leaders who want smarter, repeatable ways to generate demand and build pipeline. Each episode breaks down how CEOs, CROs, and marketing execs drive growth — from top-of-funnel tactics and AI to thought leadership that converts.
Growth Wizards - Scott McNabb
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Tanner Green: [00:00:00] All right, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Growth Wizards. We're super excited to have Scott McNabb here for a wonderful new episode for the Growth Wizards podcast. Scott, thanks for joining us.
Scott McNabb: I'm so thrilled to be here. Thanks, Tanner, and Growth Wizards is is an amazing channel, and I'm just thrilled to death to be a part of the discussion today. We got a lot to cover, so let's get into it.
Tanner Green: Yes, sir. Cool. Scott, why don't we jump in? we'd love to hear a little bit more about you and where you're from and what your story's all about. Tell us a little about yourself.
Scott McNabb: So Tanner, my name is Scott McNabb. I'm the former chief revenue officer at a company called Assembly Software, which is a software provider in the case management industry for the legal, specifically the PI space, the personal injury attorney space. That's the company behind Neos, the cloud platform that that is modernizing the legal case management world.
I'm also a twenty-year military veteran [00:01:00] and former fighter weapons instructor with the United States Air Force, specifically on the F-15E and the F-4 Phantom platforms. And I'm gonna walk through some of during our time today, some things that might translate from my military background around briefing and debriefing and how most revenue teams never learn the amazing skill set that they might garner from that military background.
Tanner Green: Love it. Amazing
Scott McNabb: live in Atlanta, Georgia. Father of two. Twenty-eight year married, two kids, graduated from Georgia Tech and in the north part of Atlanta. So thrilled to death to be here, and thanks for having me, Tanner.
Tanner Green: Awesome. Love it. Thanks so much, Scott. So I wanted to jump in to our piece of news first, and this is a really fun one. I'm excited to chat about this with you. And so I'll just dive right in. There are two releases that we're gonna do at the same time that have to do with each other. And so the first one is [00:02:00] Anthropic's launch of AI legal tool. That is, a huge breakthrough, some may call it a breakthrough, some may call it a disaster for the AI space of jumping into legal. Everyone knows that legal and finance are really tricky spaces to have AI because of hallucinations and, data leaks, and there's lots of different things there.
But that is a huge piece of news that I wanna report. And the other one is similar to it, where the legal data that has been released, and you may express this a little bit more eloquently than I have Scott. I'm not necessarily the most eloquent, which is why I love to have this podcast, because there are many more people that are more well-spoken than I am.
But the legal decisions of, or inside of court are now available inside of the ChatGPT realm. So essentially, maybe you can explain it better than I can, and I'm trying to just wrap my head around it as well. [00:03:00] But anything that has been described or researched or asked about inside of an LLM can now be visible in the court space.
Is that fair to fair to say, or maybe you can have a little bit better-
Scott McNabb: So we'll go backwards. So the first one that you mentioned, Tanner, is this notion that there's legislation that was recently passed that basically allowed anything AI, whether it be the prompt, the answer, the hallucination to the answer, the change in the prompt, all of that is now discoverable in court which was not something before that plagued the minds of the legal community.
And that's scared everyone to death because now anything I search for, the prompt, if it was an incorrect prompt, if it was the right prompt but the wrong answer was provided back, all of that now is discoverable in court. So everybody in the legal community, as one notable [00:04:00] example, but if you think about it, could be applied across multiple different things that is all now subject to be discovered and could be used against you in a court of law.
That coupled with the fact that now Anthropic has, clearly stated their intention to get into not only the legal space but, a gazillion other industries that they're creating templates, and they're creating instead of software as a service, they're creating this notion of service as software.
Therefore, Anthropic can sell, and I think I've read ten articles in the last two months about people scared to death that Anthropic is gonna destroy their margins because now Anthropic can offer template-based solutions across multiple different industries and verticals that could destroy their margins.
Because now I can use Anthropic to do just five things that I need to do versus buying a software product that does a hundred things, but that I really may only [00:05:00] use sixty percent of those things.
Tanner Green: Right. So how does that affect your space? You've been in the legal space a lot for a long time, and how does that affect you, the way you think about where these softwares and services are going and how this affects it?
Scott McNabb: I would say it's a great question. I think the reality is whether it's legal or again, ten other industries that I've been in. I've been in the MarTech space, I've been in legal, I've been in, data on the data side from Verisk's perspective. At the end of the day, everybody is scared to death.
Scared is probably the wrong term, but they're concerned, and they're focused on trying to make sure that AI is not gonna cripple their market segment or in this case, probably get them in trouble or, you could lose your legal license if you made the wrong decision as relates to a client in what might be...
And I-- over the last almost a year, I've been working around the personal injury space [00:06:00] and, if you've got a forty million dollar claim or a prospect and you're trying to get to a judgment or to a end of day some kind of a ruling, then AI could actually hamper your ability to close that case out.
But apply the same model to anything that's legislatively regulated not just legal, but anything where there is some kind of legislation on the back end or oversight from a government perspective. We gotta be really careful even down to the way that sales reps are engaging with their prospects.
And what they're saying to the prospects can now all be also discoverable. So if I said my product could do a thing and using AI, it determine-- that it can't do that thing, now we've got a case in court to kill the license, retract the offer. The list goes on and on. So sales reps are not legal experts.
They never have been. And so [00:07:00] we've got to be really careful now about what it is that we promised, what features and functions that we choose to, state that a product can, solve for. That's a thing that's driving the sales reps into a new mode.
Tanner Green: Yeah, definitely. And I agree, and I think they're-- sales reps always, especially in AI these days, they always need to be careful on how they approach if they're selling, softwares or talking about anywhere in these touchy spaces. They definitely have to adapt every single month it feels like, because this, new things come every, all the time, and it's just lots of changes that they're really needing to adapt to.
And it's a good thing that they're, the salespeople these days I feel are very on top of it. I think back in the day it was put your head down and grind and do your thing and nothing wrong with that. I think that was actually like an incredible way to do it, and I think honestly more of us need that these days.
But there are a lot of different kind of [00:08:00] more strategic approaches to selling now than there was back then. And maybe I could be wrong 'cause I've not, as been in the space as much as, as long as you have, Scott. But I feel like it is, it's really cool to have AI assist with that adjustment as well.
So
Scott McNabb: I would agree, but I would challenge the perspective that the reps are on top of it. Because the problem is that
They're currently drowning in a sea of AI telling them the answers to the problem. And if you look at tools like Gong and Clari and even all of their cadence tools like SalesLoft and, you know, even Salesforce with the agentic engine all of these tools have some flavor of an AI, and the worry is that they're drowning in sort of guidance from all of these multiple different places, and it's coming at them from multiple, multiple sites, multiple systems, sometimes [00:09:00] giving them countermanding orders, for lack of a better term, right?
And again, we don't hire them for their technology skills. We hire them for their insight, their ability to understand the challenges of the customer, and the tools were always designed to be something that helps them in their day-to-day to close more deals, to get more insight, to get more engagement, and for the leadership to help them have some insight into what's working with the reps, how they're engaging with their customers, so that the seller's manager can engage you with the proper conversation and prepare you for the battle that you're about to fight.
Tanner Green: Yeah.
Scott McNabb: Sorry to use a military analogy. I got a lot of years in the military.
Tanner Green: It's a perfect segue into your military experience because I think you've told me there's a lot of applications that you can put from the military into where you're at now, and you have the arc of being 20 years in the military as a weapons system instructor. What does [00:10:00] the weapons system instructor carry into a revenue organization, and what did you find when you stepped into Assembly for example,
and what did that actually look like?
Scott McNabb: So before long ago, I helped start a company called Eloqua, and Eloqua was grown and was acquired by Oracle. Same with a company called Bloomreach, and now Assembly. I spent the last twenty years not only in the tech space, but a portion of my life in that fighter weapons systems sort of world.
As the weapon systems instructor, our function and purpose, Tanner, is to train what we call situational awareness, right? So helping the fighter, the warfighter, to understand the fight, where they are in the fight, you know, for lack of a better term, I'm gonna speak with my hands for a moment. How far away the jet is from the nearest gas, how far away the jet is from the nearest, non-enemy line so that I know how far it's gonna take me to glide if I've got no engine.
So that [00:11:00] situational awareness to save the life of the pilot, that was part of what I taught. Now, how that applies to the revenue model is teaching the sellers not only the situational awareness construct, so understanding three-dimensionally where they are in the fight, but carrying that into the revenue o-organization, it's a vivid scene, right?
They constantly don't know where they are in the fight. And it's not just about knowing who you're selling to knowing if they're for you or against you, but it's also preparing for the fight. We built a model in the aviation community called the pilot brief debrief model. And and there's a methodology to it, and it applies to selling, it applies to all customer interactions in an amazing way.
And so we've adapted that concept into this heavy brief concept. And we'll talk more about that in just a moment. but end of day, it's that three-dimensional sort of situational awareness [00:12:00] model that the reps are missing right now, understanding where they are in the fight, understanding how they could possibly win.
Understanding truly, it's a famous term, which is, if someone's not telling you how to win, you're probably losing, right? And so understanding exactly where it is that we go next, and this brief debrief model that we stole that I stole from the Air Force is being used by literally hundreds of Western fighter organizations, all across the world.
And the model works, and it works well to help the seller understand where they are in the fight.
Tanner Green: Yeah, I love that. So walk me through this brief debrief model. What does that look like in this taking it back to situational awareness and how do you and the sales team get to actually make that efficient and work well in a environment that isn't quite as military
as, as one might want in-
Scott McNabb: Totally right. And look, the goal is [00:13:00] not to apply military constructs. However it is designed to provide a methodology that is consistent. The first thing for you to know, it's an eight-step process, and I'll go through it quickly. But the first thing to know is that Most sales organizations don't truly prep for their sales calls.
They show up at the call and wait and see what happens, and then however the customer responds, then we build our next go-to-market plan, or we analyze the what happened. And then rarely does sales organizations do a formal debrief, where the sales manager and the rep or the rep and the solutions consultant and the sales manager get together after the call and really walk through what happened, why it happened, what can we do differently next time.
Rarely and we get so busy with doing demos and things and talking to people and engaging, we don't really sit down and take the time to analyze what worked and what didn't. So [00:14:00] the pilot brief-debrief model starts with the notion of, first and foremost, all rank stays on the ground. So if we prep for a flight, we go out, we do the fight, we come back, and we debrief.
When you're in the debrief, the biggest construct of this is your rank doesn't stand over anyone else's rank. So I've been in debriefs with full bird colonels, and everybody leaves their rank at the door, right? So the pre-brief
is we go through the mission and we plan out what we're gonna do. We focus on facts only, number two, so for the mission execution, what it is we're gonna do, what happens if preparing for possible contingencies, the specifics around what are the hits? What are we hoping to gain from this?
What could go wrong is a part of the equation. Same as if you're in an airplane, what if you run out of fuel? Then we're gonna do this, and this, right? So this is preparing for all contingencies. And then there's no defense, right? There's no, "Okay, you're challenging me because you [00:15:00] don't trust me."
defensiveness goes right out the door.
Everybody's gonna talk about how do we save a life and how do we make sure that everything gets done the proper way. So we brief and debrief on the misses, what could happen. The truth is important in this in step five, which is all about the root cause.
Why did this happen? Did we not see this coming? The airplane got below the power curve, and we sunk faster than we should have, and therefore, your touchdown on recovery did not, you weren't within the, the numbers that we needed for an effective return. And then we focus on behaviors, what we can adjust.
We apply this, we rebuild our attack plan, we go at it again, and then everyone in the debrief room takes personal accountability and ownership for making sure this never, ever happens again, because all it takes is twenty miles an hour too slow [00:16:00] and a hundred feet too low, and somebody's having a remarkably bad day.
So this brief-debrief model it truly changes the way that we talk about these deals. And sales reps and managers are notorious for skipping this step. I would submit that this is the most important step of the engagement
Tanner Green: Yeah. And so since they are notoriously not great at this, what have you done with your teams to instill that culture in them and made them excited about it or learn from it or understand a little bit better why it works?
Scott McNabb: I think we've implemented this concept a-as a part of a broader sort of retooling of the go-to-market strategy. From this approach, we've seen some remarkable results. The Assembly technology is part of a long-standing marriage and melding together of two legal [00:17:00] technologies, one called Needles and one called TrialWorks.
Those joined together, and then from that spanned a new cloud-based technology called Neos, and selling this into the legal world when people were really happy with the on-prem solutions they might have had before. So as a part of that, migration is a big deal. So moving them from their old solution to the new cloud-based solution.
We saw a seventy-five percent migration, and that number was increasing as I was departing the company. We saw a ninety-two percent retention number, which is remarkable in the industry. So really not just with sales cycles, but with things like QBRs, quarterly business reviews, with our existing customers.
So making sure that retention and churn is under control by making sure that we're being very methodical about the way we're choosing to engage and having a plan before. It's amazing how many people show up for QBRs and don't have a game plan for [00:18:00] what happens when they turn sideways. Again, when the airplane gets too slow or too low, they don't have a game plan for this.
So retention goes up. With this model, we saw a pipeline increase of about thirty percent because we took the time to pre-brief, plan the mission, and then execute, and then actually do a formal debrief afterwards. So pipeline increase, we saw about a thirty percent. And then we actually using this model, Tanner, we actually saw a, a lowering of the days in stage, right?
So we had deals that were sitting in stage five of a six-stage deal cycle, and they would basically languish in that stage five for far too long, and only because we went backwards in the sales process to figure out what did we miss. So instead of letting it stall in stage five, we go back to three or four and realize there's some stuff we stepped over that is [00:19:00] really important that we can't miss so that we can move the deal faster, but at the right stage with the right information and using this debrief model really taught us how to do that.
Tanner Green: Yeah. I love that. So when you found out like, hey, there was at this part of the revenue engine, we can find a major hinge and, or a major hiccup in the process or in however we were selling, you were selling it or building it. And so when that changed your mind about how you were running the business, what... I'm sure that all of your sales team was like, "Wow, that was a big help for us," and everyone kinda jumped on board. And so some of these are like concrete examples that you have in your your time at Assembly and Verisk and Bloomreach and your catch and release your models that you've built over there.
So what do those numbers look like? What are some of those [00:20:00] concrete examples that you can give of "Hey, here's what we did. Here's maybe a hiccup or some success we found," and then what were the numbers?
Scott McNabb: Yeah, no, it's a great segue. Look, I'll-- first I'll hit you with the reality is they didn't embrace it to begin with, They don't. And the biggest reason why they didn't embrace it w-was the standard answer that most of us throw, which is, "I'm too busy to follow a methodology," right?
"I got nine demos I'm doing in the next two days. I'm just-- it's a numbers game. If I do enough demos, if I make enough sales calls, somebody will find a way towards, an opportunity that I can close." From Verisk to Bloomreach to catch and release, it didn't work well initially.
But it's because we didn't take the time to explain what the outcomes could be, to your point, and then guided them as sales leaders through the first couple of times that are uncomfortable, right? So people don't like change, [00:21:00] and this is part of the equation. But again, you're gonna, as a part of the equation, you're gonna see deals move at a more rapid pace.
Again, thirty, forty percent increase in the pipeline velocity. That's huge. And all it takes for them is for them to see that, Tanner, for a month or two, and they're like, "Hey, this actually works, and I can slow down to go fast." To use , a great quote from one of my former sales leaders, Alex Shootman. He said, "Sometimes you gotta slow down to go fast."
And that's the only thing that will save you, is taking the time to really dig in on what I'm gonna do, what it looks like, what could go wrong, and then running the play and then getting back together again, forcing ourselves after every call, let's jump back on a call and let's do our recast. And from that, we see, again, reduced age and stage, twenty, thirty percent decrease in the days and stage, and deals close more quickly.
[00:22:00] But because we ran the right play, we also walked away from deals that, that had fundamentally flawed mission programs, right? Where we knew going into the fight we were gonna lose. Why are we not pulling out of these deals sooner, more often? Because they don't match the ICP, they don't match the challenge.
And so You know, these are the five things that I'm being held to: migration rate, retention rate, pipeline increases, reduction in cycle time, revenue growth, and close rate, right? So those are-- revenue growth and close rate are synonymous together. So using this model, we saw a significant increase by industry standards.
And you know what? It gave the sellers more confident-- more confidence. They knew that when they strapped on the jet, so to speak, sorry to use that military analogy, but when they strapped on the jet, they were gonna go fight, they were gonna go fight hard. Somebody was gonna be honest with them about what happened during the [00:23:00] mission, and I saw this behavior, and that's gonna lead to this.
I would change this behavior, leaving rank at the door. Meaning everybody that's on the call has the equal opportunity to, with no rank, with no, worry that my boss is gonna see me as inferior. Everybody has the chance to lead in. Everybody has the chance to receive that feedback and change their behavior so that the next mission and the next mission after that are even stronger and better, and we close deals faster with a higher chance of knowing more about what the challenge is that the customer faces.
And if you know me, Peter Drucker is famous for saying, "If you show me that you know me, I'll care what you know."
And so it's not just about personal relationships, it's really digging in the old days, we used the term ROI. The new term that goes with it is called COI. You heard that term before, Tanner?
Tanner Green: No, no
Scott McNabb: It's the notion of cost of inaction. The problem with ROI [00:24:00] is that rarely do reps actually come back after they've pitched an ROI model and close the loop on the return. With COI, we focused on the cost of inaction. What happens if nothing changes? How much longer Sorry to use the medical analogy, but how much longer are you willing to let blood spurt out of your arm before you're willing to put a tourniquet on it?
If we don't help the customer or the prospect understand the cost of doing nothing, then we've left them alone flying in the open sky, and there's no way to land the plane.
Tanner Green: I love it. I love it. I think that's amazing. And I think there's definitely a piece to be said about, when you put an investment into your business, what are you doing to maintain it and to keep it... It's like a yard, I just bought a house with my wife, so this is my analogy.
I don't have 20 years of military experience, so this is where I go to my analogies. But, if you, once you buy a house, this is the first house we've had with an actual [00:25:00] yard, and, it's nice to have a yard. It's really beautiful. It can be awesome. But you have to keep it you have to keep managing it.
You have to keep, taking care of it, to pulling the weeds and trimming the grass, and all of those things that you need to do to keep it up and make it look nice. And it's the same principle of the brief and the debrief, is you have to have that maintenance in your system, otherwise it's gonna get messy and hairy and, overgrown, and then it just becomes too much to handle.
So
Scott McNabb: gotta keep your tools sharpened. Same thing, right? You're trying to cut around that kitchen of yours that you're trying to destroy and rebuild. You gotta keep your tools sharp. And look I know we're just selling software here, so we're not curing cancer. However that lazy, sorry to use the term, that laziness that comes with complacency and not continuing to sharpen your knives and sharpen your tools, that all begins and ends with [00:26:00] a fair and honest assessment of how the last kitchen build happened, what went wrong, what could have been better.
In the pilot, in the aviation community, these things you're doing are designed to save their life. Cause because complacency on final approach, too slow, too low, leads to disaster every time, and you got pilots that have been doing this for twenty years, and they get complacent. But this no-rank model takes a twenty-year veteran and says, "Okay, look, you did this wrong, and here's what that could have done, and what are you gonna do to change that next time?
Why do you think that happened?" Engaging with the sales team to really help them understand how to be better at their craft is what I'm paid to do, what, you're paid to teach. It's the biggest shift, I think, that we're not making in the sales world, and AI is just further confusing it because it's giving them [00:27:00] improper signals.
Tanner Green: Yeah, I love it. Scott, unfortunately we're running out of time here for the podcast, and I could talk about this kind of stuff all day. This is fascinating. But I wanted to jump into a few quick questions, maybe one or two if we got time for one or two,
that we can jump into.
And I wanted to get your thoughts on, you have a very interesting you have a great grasp on what your team is doing and how they're doing it and where that's, where the success is living and where it might need improvement especially given your brief, debrief model that you apply. You have a lot of visibility in there and you lead from the front.
I love it. Where do you think AI is actually helping the GTM space and earning its keep? A- and where is it still just noise and maybe even slop?
Scott McNabb: I will say I was a conscientious objector a year ago, even to the notion of Claude and ChatGPT and was using it the way that most people are using it, [00:28:00] to ask a question and get a response. Using Claude as an example, and this is not a commercial for Claude, I restructured my entire go-to-market organization by starting backwards from comp plans to P&Ls to numbers from the reps, understanding their historical, the sine wave that goes with their performances, understanding where we were seeing the best conversion rates by rep type, whether it's an AE or an account manager or even a CSM.
And I spent the last year just plugging all of those numbers in, and the answer that I got back was, "You're doing it wrong." And I never expected that. I thought it would do nothing but hallucinate and tell me how perfect it was I was doing it. And as a result of that, I had data, i-including comp models and things of that nature, that would have taken me six months to really and analyze a strategy.
And I [00:29:00] did this in days, not weeks, not months. And within two weeks after that, I'm redoing my go-to-market strategy. I'm re, moving the people, the deck chairs and, shuffling people around, getting the firefighters closest to the fire. Sorry to use a firefighting analogy now, but getting the, the firefighters closest to the fire, I think, is where AI has really changed my perspective on go-to-market.
And I would encourage that for everyone. Don't just use it to answer questions. Load it up with data and then get AI to help you formulate a strategy. Validate that internally with all the other senior executives, of course, but I wouldn't take anything for what I've learned in the last year.
Tanner Green: Yeah. Awesome. I love it. That just goes to show that, I think there's lots of changes, and AI's getting better every single day, and it's just a crazy world we live in. So stay, everyone stay on top of it and make sure we can use this as well as we can. But [00:30:00] Scott, thanks so much for coming on the show.
This was a ton of fun. Loved learning about the brief, debrief discipline and learning about how you think how you behave in your teams and with your teams, and how this kind of all dives into creating that single engine that can really make a huge difference in, in, in these go-to-market engines.
Super fun. G- Scott, where can people go find you and connect with you?
Scott McNabb: Yeah. So you can find me on LinkedIn, just Scott McNabb, S-C-O-T-T M-C-N-A-B-B. And I'm pretty easy to find. Been in the industry for the better part of the last twenty years. I just also wanna thank you, Tanner, and for Growth Wizards. You guys are leading the charge in thinking differently, thinking outside the box with regard to go-to-market and AI and sales teams and I'm thrilled to death to be a part of the discussion today.
If there's anything I can do to help anybody that's listening today just reach out, grab me, and let's have a conversation
Tanner Green: [00:31:00] Awesome. Love it. Thanks a bunch, Scott, for coming on the show, and thanks for all the listeners for tuning in
Scott McNabb: Thanks everybody