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How do you get CAC:PB below 12? How do you get reps to close 50% more ARR? By focusing on unit economics.
In this episode, we focus on that, merging PLG + SLG and more with Kevin McIntyre.
This episode is brought to you by Everstage - the highest rated Sales Commissions Platform on G2, Gartner Peer Insights, Trustradius with over 2,000+ customer reviews. Some of their customers include leading brands like Diligent, Wiley, Trimble, Postman, Chargebee etc.,
In this episode, we focus on that, merging PLG + SLG and more with Kevin McIntyre.
- (00:00) - Introduction
- (04:24) - Why merge
- (07:02) - Bringing together PLG and SLG
- (10:24) - Challenges and Strategies Post-Merger
- (13:38) - Focus on Unit Economics and Sales Efficiency
- (32:40) - Where AI will assist
- (38:01) - Reflections on CRO Tenure and Final Thoughts
This episode is brought to you by Everstage - the highest rated Sales Commissions Platform on G2, Gartner Peer Insights, Trustradius with over 2,000+ customer reviews. Some of their customers include leading brands like Diligent, Wiley, Trimble, Postman, Chargebee etc.,
You can go to https://www.everstage.com/revenue-formula to check out Everstage and mention Revenue Formula to unlock a personalized Sales Compensation Strategy Session with Everstage’s RevOps experts—crafted for enterprise teams to maximize performance.
Never miss a new episode, join our newsletter on revenueformula.substack.com
Creators and Guests
What is The Revenue Formula?
This podcast is about scaling tech startups.
Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Raul Porojan, together they look at the full funnel.
With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.
If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.
[00:00:00] Toni: What's The impact of focusing on unit economics?
[00:00:04] As it turns out, quite a lot.
[00:00:07] Kevin: Each AE is delivering about 50 percent more ARR per year than they were in 2022, because we did.
[00:00:15] a number of things to improve the capacity and what they were able to do. Some of it is as simple as the right incentives and comp plans, and what either setting things like monthly, like growth targets and stretch targets
[00:00:30] Toni: that's Kevin McIntyre, CRO at Dealfront.
[00:00:34] And he shares not only how they improved the unit economics,
[00:00:37] but also the pains of being multi product and multi motion.
[00:00:42] Kevin: you may have had one marketing team only focusing in Germany and, and now they're trying to pick up things more across Europe, across the U. S. We started having inefficiencies. We didn't have. The right product market fit for each point solution in all geos, even though we were trying to go to market and, and expand
[00:01:02] Toni: Before we jump into the show, today's is to you by EverStage, the top sales commissions platform on G2, Gartner, Peer Insights,
[00:01:12] and Trust Radius with more 2000 reviews from customers like Diligent, Wiley,
[00:01:18] Trimble, and more.
[00:01:19] Visit everstage. com and mention Revenue Formula unlock a personalized sales compensation strategy session with one of EverStage's RevOps experts.
[00:01:30] And now, enjoy the show,
[00:01:32] Mikkel: And, uh, I mean, I guess also now we can talk about it. I thought actually we were going to record being in the same time zone. For some reason, I thought that was going to be the case. You recently just moved.
[00:01:44] Kevin: Yeah so when I was exposed to the revenue formula and following your good work, I was living in Turin in Northern Italy. It's when I started my opportunity with, with DealFront towards the end of 2022. But my wife and I were, were American. We had an opportunity with my former employer. We took advantage of it and moved overseas. I was in a global role. So we were living in Northern Italy. It's a very long story how we ended up there specifically. But we had our first daughter. She was born in Turin. And we quickly found out that my wife was pregnant with her second late last year. Or earlier this year, excuse me, or everything's confused between 2024 and 2025. We are in the new year. So shortly after our, our daughter was born, we found out my wife was pregnant with our second and recognize that it would just be too difficult raising a young family with like a one year old and a newborn overseas without the support system.
[00:02:45] So we did, we did move back to the U S in June. So that was about seven months ago close to my wife's family in, in Boston. Which is coincidentally where, where our investors are as, as well. So our investors are in Boston, but I continue to serve as, as the CRO for, for deal front, but my hours are a bit different.
[00:03:06] So I'm in front of my computer at 4. 30 in the morning most days.
[00:03:10] Toni: Mikkel, I'm so happy that we found someone else to give a, a dad and a kid's intro. It's,
[00:03:15] it's not just us actually, you know,
[00:03:16] there are a couple of few other folks as well.
[00:03:18] Mikkel: I was really thinking, so the whole back to back thing is like screams efficiency in my book. So I'm happy about that. And the other thing
[00:03:26] Kevin: I, I can actually hear them screaming upstairs right now.
[00:03:30] Mikkel: it's also like for the listener to know, we don't edit everything in this show. So it is in fact, a kid crying in the background and a dad deciding.
[00:03:39] This podcast more important. The other, the other thing is, yeah, exactly. The other thing is we have this term, Toni and I when we talk called KidsOps. So Kids Operations, right? And we had it even this morning. It's like, Hey, I'm going to be late. KidsOps need 30 minutes more, you know, that kind of thing.
[00:03:56] Kevin: But that would make my wife the CKO in the family. The Chief Kids Operations Officer.
[00:04:03] Toni: I, I call my wife just VP of life, you know, just let's,
[00:04:08] you
[00:04:08] know, one one step higher up,
[00:04:10] Kevin: But only a VP, she's not promoted higher.
[00:04:12] Toni: No, there's no C
[00:04:13] Mikkel: And you don't want to come on a, you don't want to get on a PIP. You don't want to get
[00:04:17] on
[00:04:17] Toni: I'm
[00:04:17] just, I'm just a janitor here. Trust
[00:04:19] Mikkel: taken it too far now. I think we can segue into the episode. Kevin, thanks so much for joining us.
[00:04:24] Obviously super interesting to have you on the show because obviously deal front is the result of really two companies.
[00:04:31] Merging, right? And I think that triggered a lot of stories where like, Oh, actually we should, we should get Kevin on the show and talk because I think we've been bumping into each other on and off on on LinkedIn. And I just, maybe to begin, begin with, can you give some context for the listeners?
[00:04:47] What were their two companies doing and why did they merge?
[00:04:51] Kevin: Yeah, absolutely, and first and foremost, guys, just thank you for having me. It's an absolute pleasure. I mean, I, I I've listened to the podcast for many years and knowing you've had folks like Jaco Van Der Kooij, Kevin Dorsey, Chris Walker Adam Robinson recently, and here I am among those people and it's definitely an honor.
[00:05:11] So I do appreciate the opportunity.
[00:05:14] So, so deal front. Yes, so in kind of mid 2022 once upon a time there was Lead Feeder. Headquartered in Finland that company may have more brand recognition with, with the audience. Web visitor identification company PLG driven so with, with free plans and, and really kind of trial driven with, with sales assist from a sales process. Remote first, kind of decentralized organization. Merged with Echobot out of Karlsruhe, Germany, about a 90 minute car ride south of Frankfurt Airport. B2B sales intelligence company and contact data, similar spaces. Other known organizations like Lucia, Cognizant, ZoomInfo, and so on. So in a similar space, but very, very focused on the Dock market. Really specializing in GDP GDPR compliant data and supporting the growth there. And our investors Great Hill Partners Coincidentally, out of Boston where, where I am now they were looking to expand into making non U. S. investments so they started looking at European technology companies and through their due diligence process really thought the blend of web visitor data and first party intent data combined with traditional B2B company contact other signals would marry really well to help marketing, operational, sales professionals really prioritize where to spend time, energy, and effort on your ICP for marketing campaigns, sales prospecting, but also engaging your inbound demand.
[00:06:55] Toni: So when I just listened to this, right, Leadfeeder very much PLG, the guys out of Karlsruhe much more sales led,
[00:07:02] how, how, how was it, how was it to kind of bring those two cultures on the sales floor, on the commercial teams? How was it to bring those together?
[00:07:10] Kevin: You could probably edit the question to be how was it slash how is it. So still very much a, a work in progress over the last kind of two and a half years. At first, because when you enter into this type of relationship, you don't end up having kind of a joint uniform platform overnight, right?
[00:07:30] Like that's the vision. We're in a much better place now, but we continue to execute against that. So when the organizations came together, it was very much about bringing people together, but do no harm. Right. And not disrupting your, your funnels, not disrupting your sales process and don't disrupt the results and performance of the business.
[00:07:49] So wanting to ensure that we could start to create kind of a uniform company, a uniform culture, but still delivering against what each of the legacy companies was selling. So in, in my role, working with, with my leaders and my teams trying to, really continue with that specialization of the appropriate sales process and buying experience for the right product. And so we continued to sell LeadFeeder and still very much do today through PLG driven experience and with more traditional sales intelligence solutions sold through again like Discovery, Demo. a trial if it makes sense, and then closing through an SLG sales process. And, and it was hard. It's not easy to manage multiple funnels and multiple go to market motions.
[00:08:49] And you think about trying to understand your business metrics, your conversion rates forecasting management, like, this became very tricky. And over time we started to to bring these together. Because standalone, they had different product market fit, right? And Echobot, as mentioned, had a very very finite kind of focus on the German market, which we've been expanding.
[00:09:16] And the lead feeder business was very pan European and also North American. So working to ensure that you have the right teams focused on the right markets with the right process in place. Has, has been expanding and now, fast forward to where we are now we do have like blended teams empowered to sell the entry points into our platform because, fast forward where we are now, the two products are, are working together, delivering a platform like experience, but there's still entry points perhaps for a singular use case.
[00:09:49] So, we have to be in a position where we can. Deliver the buying or selling experience that best makes sense for our prospect but also putting them into a position where they can realize value from their initial business problem or use case. And then we earn the right to, to expand across the platform.
[00:10:10] But we've got teams that are now geo based across Europe and in North America, and it's not so much like sales process specific as it was before.
[00:10:22] Toni: So you mentioned do no harm, right.
[00:10:24] And there might be some folks listening from your team at some point here, but I just wanted to double click on this for a second. So I've been part of a couple of, you know, M& A processes as well, both being acquired and acquiring other folks, right. Looking back, like, because this, this merger now is what, like, how old is it now, a year old or
[00:10:42] how much longer?
[00:10:43] Kevin: two and a half, two and a
[00:10:45] Toni: two and a
[00:10:46] half Looking back now and this might be on the, on the top of someone, someone else's mind listening. Do you think that the approach of like, do no harm, which is great for culture, great for the team and so forth. Do you think that was the right way to go? Or should there have been more of a, you know, rip the bandaid off kind of approach, you know, to accelerate things?
[00:11:03] Kevin: I do wish, with the benefit of hindsight, that we would have expedited this process more last year.
[00:11:14] Because entering this year, 2025, is I think we finally have where we want to be. With particularly our new business sales professionals. Being able to focus on the comprehensive platform that we're selling, being able to focus on the different use cases, Empowered to leverage a PLG or SLG buying and selling experience, depending on what makes sense for for that prospect. We're doing that now and like last year, it was still more kind of solution based and buying process based and I think that set us back. I think we were, it ended up kind of maintaining this division between one product and the other, as opposed to having a focus on who we are now as, as deal front but still being able to cater to different use cases and different personas, because that, that's what a platform does and selling a platform is complicated. And you don't just have an orchestrated sales process for a single SaaS application. And I do wish with the benefit of hindsight we had started this kind of unification and harmonization of the sales team earlier.
[00:12:36] Toni: Yeah. And kind of one, one additional question on top of this, right? So this obviously sounds like a already fairly complex setup, right? You have this, this PLG set up the SLG set up, you have different geos that you're targeting, working on probably different segments as well. You know, different channels, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:12:55] Right. When, when when someone like these US guys are buying those two companies and putting them together or kind of, I don't know how the details worked out. I, I would assume that there was a lot of focus on, you know, improving unit economics over time. Right. And that matched with the complexities of the business or the go to market rather that you just described, I would love to kind of double click on this action and kind of try and figure out. You know, was this a focus for you? Was this a mandate coming from, from the boardroom, from the CFO? And if so, how did you execute against it? How do you kind of get, you know, get the improvements that, that those folks wanted?
[00:13:35] Kevin: It's, it's a great, great point.
[00:13:38] And like being a first time CRO, this was probably the first time in my career that I've actually really had to focus on, on unit economics and in the way that I have to. And when you consider the timing of the, the merger in mid 2022, that's kind of when this phase shift within B2B SaaS, particularly for go to market tech really started to occur and moving away from kind of growth at all costs to focused on profitable, sustainable, efficient growth. And I remember. One of my first interactions with the board and probably one of the more embarrassing things that I've done is this was in kind of late summer, early fall of 2022, and they were looking at high level kind of growth projections for the next year, 2023. Like what kind of headcount investments would we need to be making?
[00:14:37] And I was just learning the performance of the team and what each AE was delivering and, and just the different components and metrics of the marketing funnel. And based on what I knew made some extrapolation for how many headcount we would need to hire in the next year. And it was something like, Hey, let's just add like 20 or 30 reps based on what they're currently delivering in order to hit certain growth metrics. And I, I look back at that now laughing because we've done so much to improve the output and capacity of each individual AE. And and that's really, I think the focus of, of so many teams right now. It's making sure that the investments that you're making within your go to market motions across marketing, across sales development. across the AEs and whether it's enablement and RevOps functions that you're getting more out of, out of these resources. And and, and we've been able to over the course of the last two years kind of blended each AE is delivering about 50 percent more ARR per year than they were in 2022, because we.
[00:15:58] did did a number of things to improve the capacity and what they were able to do. Some of it is as simple as the right incentives and comp plans, and what either setting things like monthly, like growth targets and stretch targets to help them look at achieving against their plan in a rateable manner. We started putting out, like, new logo bonuses that have never been there. And you have reps that were comfortable maybe closing one, two, three deals per month. Can you challenge them to get four or five, right? And, like, these incremental things can really help to pay out. And it wasn't just about, like, AE capacity and getting more out of the resources we have.
[00:16:40] We, we spent a lot of time Looking at CAC Payback as, as the primary unit economic that what we were focused on because you can imagine bringing two organizations together and trying to expand kind of the, the scope of your go to market efforts and you may have had one marketing team only focusing in Germany and, and now they're trying to pick up things more across Europe, across the U.
[00:17:06] S. We started having inefficiencies. We didn't have. The right product market fit for each point solution in all geos, even though we were trying to go to market and, and expand where we were seeing success. and and so, Certain marketing strategies in what works in Germany doesn't necessarily work in Netherlands, doesn't necessarily work in Finland, where you can meaningfully deploy like sales development resources to have multiple people involved in the sales process isn't going to work for all markets or for all of our selling motions. And so we had to do an assessment throughout like 2023, early last year, again, 2024 of really kind of breaking down our customer acquisition costs and looking at where marketing euros were being spent and breaking it down into, Like our PPC and like ad spend
[00:18:11] versus what's going into Drive Organic, what's going into content, what's going into referral programs, among other things, where we had SDRs deployed where we had AEs deployed and, and perhaps are we in the right markets for where we're able to see success and being able to break all of these down and understand like what is working, what's not working, what might need more time. And the net of this was we had certain go to market motions in certain geographies that had CAC payback of, I want to say, more than 20 months for some. But I, but I am happy to say that throughout, by the end of last year, across the business, we're under 12 months now through, through this effort. And that's per region.
[00:19:02] It's for different market segments. So some as low as 8 or 9 months but all of them under 12.
[00:19:09] Mikkel: So I actually just want to take a little bit of a step back because it's, it's kind of a major accomplishment you just outlined in in a long walkthrough here, but you started with something really interesting. And I think the beginning is, is really important for a lot of folks to get, which is.
[00:19:26] You said, let's just hire more reps. And then you started focusing on the unit economics and at least from what I'm fathoming, you started focusing on sales. I'm just wondering what happened in between? What made you go, no, wait, actually we can't just hire more reps or like, I'm just trying to get what, what was the sequence of events that, that unfolded and led you down the path of, of focusing on this
[00:19:49] stuff?
[00:19:50] Kevin: Well, well, I, I think the very first was the board saying, Hey, thanks for that recommendation, but it's probably a bit aggressive. Like, learn more
[00:20:00] about the business before pursuing this. And
[00:20:03] ultimately, like you started to, See some of the changing trends just in an overall macro and like that.
[00:20:12] That's not enough to, to to drive all of this change in focus, but it was certainly an input of what's happening around us.
[00:20:20] And then thoughtfully looking at this and like, I'm not, we as a business should not start investing into teams and resources until we have kind of a stable foundation. And Making sure that we're not leaning in too hard, too quickly.
[00:20:40] Now we did in certain areas of the business, right? I mean, we're, we're not doing a complete retro on, on everything in, in the merger. And there were certain areas that I, that I know, like we made mistakes because we either moved too quickly or maybe had some wrong assumptions that, that we learned from. But at least from the go to market side, we, we did pause to ensure that, We weren't just going to start scaling just because we want to and building on the excitement that a merger provides and we just want to invest and move quickly. But, but rather let's make sure that we can execute against what we know we can do well. And as we start bringing products together, start unifying teams, as our vision evolves a bit for the, the platform experience, that we're in command of, of these unit economics and we're able to Then, if we've earned the right to scale, we can. And, and just to help kind of paint the picture of how difficult this is, Echobot and Leadfeeder were, were very equal in a lot of different ways.
[00:21:42] They were of similar size in terms of like number of people, and with, with the ARR that, that they had. And both organizations had been around for, I think, at least kind of seven or eight years at this point. And so their management systems, their tools, their processes had grown organically over that time to support the businesses that they were at the time of a merger. And then essentially overnight, you have systems, tools, processes, decision making that's been made to support a company of X. And now all of a sudden the company is 2X. And so like the internal, like in air quotes, infrastructure supporting that company wasn't there. So having everything in like two systems, through two management cultures, different sets of data, trying to piece together the accurate view to understand things like what is our blended LTV? What is our customer acquisition cost? How does that differ from? Like a PLG motion in Finland to an SLG motion in Germany. And how does that depend or change from like SMB to mid market? So like normalizing all of this data and getting that into a trusted spot. So we could really understand where we are. That took like six to nine months. And we get into the second half of 2023 and realize that. The math behind some of our go to market motions didn't make sense. And that's why we really started focusing on breaking down the customer acquisition cost so we could have the right resources in the right regions, focused on the right solutions and just get that efficient as possible.
[00:23:34] Toni: So it's really cool that you talk about the data piece, the systems piece, trying to understand all of that stuff. But I'm, I'm also wondering that, so in, in, in a merger like this of, of two equals joining, right, there's sometimes, at least, you know, from my experience, there's sometimes lots of politics going on, right?
[00:23:52] Kind of who's actually leading and kind of who's taking what and so forth, right? There's all kinds of things. on the people side that are happening. And then you kind of throw this, okay, now we actually need to think completely differently about this whole thing. You throw this into the mix as well. I just wanted to hear if you have some advice or some stories to share on how do you get this. Hey, we need to be efficient CAC Payback or whatever you want to, you know, LTV to CAC ratio, whatever you're choosing. This is now the number to hunt for. This is now what we need to kind of first figure out and then understand how did you drive this into the business, right? Kind of how, how, how, how did you, how did you get this to stick with all of your leaders around you and then actually being able to execute this?
[00:24:32] Kevin: Well, the good thing was at, at the C level and executive leadership, like, we were pretty aligned that this needed to improve. Because we were operating efficiently in some areas, but, but inefficiently in, in, in others, and agreeing that we, we need to look into this. But a key, a really key part of this one of two key parts, aside from leadership alignment on that, was one belief in, in, in strength in, in revenue operations. And the, the former CRO of, of Leadfeeder. Transition to be our VP of RevOps. He's a big fan of the show as well, so shout out to Yako. But he was really instrumental in helping us get the data in the right place. And how we had to kind of aggregate data in the data warehouse from a lot of different systems.
[00:25:27] And it's not perfect, but it improved a lot. And being able to have this, you know level of transparency and getting, like, the right dashboards and reports to make it available, right? And actually being able to visualize things like CAC Payback and LTV CAC Ratio and ARPU and ARR per AE, like visualize. And being able to actually, like, filter by region, by team, by period, and get that out in the open. And it's not just somebody cranking everything in spreadsheets in the background and just sharing this. The fact that it's visible, I think, gets a lot of people aligned because you can, you can see it. Another thing is just, I, I think, over communicating.
[00:26:09] Like, I'm a big believer in, like, And over communicating, and it's just part of my style, and I know, like, coming into primarily 90, 95 percent European organization as, like, the foreign American leader I, I, I had to earn trust, and so over communicating, particularly in a remote first setting, would be really key, and, and whether these are, you know, Like, weekly notes to, to different teams, these are video recordings, these are all hands. Just walking people through some of the sausage making, like, along, that, that, that phrase translates, like, making the sausage, right?
[00:26:51] Mikkel: Yeah, yeah,
[00:26:52] Toni: I'm not sure it does, but I think, I mean, I think half our audience is actually
[00:26:56] from The
[00:26:56] U S so I think most of them will
[00:26:57] Kevin: Okay,
[00:26:58] Mikkel: do it all the time anyway with Danish and German and other European countries. It's fine, it's fine. Actually I wanted to double back to something you said. You know, casually throughout there, we maybe just glossed over 50 percent increase. In AR per sales rep, that is a pretty monumental lift.
[00:27:17] And it allows you as a business to achieve kind of insane things. If you have, if you can, if you can do that as a business. Meanwhile, you're merging two companies, your data is spaghetti. And, and I can imagine a lot of things are just difficult for the team. How do you manage to look at this area and lift the performance?
[00:27:36] Like, I'm just curious, what were, what was the, what led you to focus on that? And what were the steps you took with the team to kind of lift the performance?
[00:27:44] Kevin: It was, I mean, I, I referenced that kind of moment, I, one of my first moments in, in, in a board meeting after joining. That had probably more influence on me than, than I, I, I maybe cared to admit originally and, and like recommending all of those new hires when not truly understanding all of the unique economics of the business and the trajectory of macro and, and just needing to, to improve the, the the teammates that, that we had and, and recognizing just how kind of a ridiculous of a suggestion that was. And, and then, like, working with the great sales leadership that I had, and just breaking down, like, what good looks like today. And, if you look at either, like, PLG, sales assist driven teams, and the Nordics versus, or, or, SLG driven rep in Germany. Like, let's look at your best rep, let's look at your average reps, and just how are they performing? What does their average sales cycle look like? How many discovery calls are they doing? How many trials are they in? What is their win rate? How many deals are they closing? And looking at this across all teams and like, this is our baseline. I don't care what the industry says around being able to close like 6XOTE, 5XOTE, like whatever, just this is where we are. How do we make it better? If reps are closing two deals a month, how do we get it to three? If they're closing five, how do we get it to seven? If they're doing 20 discovery calls a month, can we make it 30? If the win rate is 30%, can we make it 35? And you start to track this and look at this pretty closely.
[00:29:29] And it's, if we have levers to pull, which ones are those to help them get better? Is it a motivation or incentive thing? All right, let's look at the comp plan. How can we put carrots to help them? do a little bit more. And if you look at expanding into a region, if we're going to put more like marketing campaign euros or investment, does that mean if you can have two or three reps in a region who are currently closing X, if you think based on that investment and corresponding pipeline is going to improve, can those three reps close X plus Y instead of needing to add a fourth rep? Right? And so it's always being able to understand the capacity of what you can do with the resource you have. And I think one of your episodes you highlighted, this is probably a while ago, like the Benioff rule, right? Of hiring reps and just like trying to get ahead of always having capacity and when to add more reps. And I strongly feel that where we are right now That it's not about adding more reps. It's about getting more out of your team. And if you're making the right investments into support systems, enablement, tooling, rev ops, sales development, marketing, how can you empower those reps to be even more and more successful? And this isn't just about like mitigating expense and cost for, for the humans on the sales team. It's about empowering them to be able to deliver more. And I think reps love closing more, right? And, and it makes them happy and adding more impact to the business. And like, I, I don't, no matter how much we're growing, like I, I don't really envision, or I don't want to be adding a lot of headcount and I haven't even mentioned just the impact of AI, right.
[00:31:28] And bringing that in and being able to, to get more out of our teams. And we're, we're early on that journey. I mean, we're, we've. There's a couple tools and things that we're doing, both internally with our own development and looking at certain vendors, but, like, that's relatively untapped as well.
[00:31:44] Toni: So I was about to actually go there. But but before, before that just wanted to also reiterate. This whole idea of, you know, benchmarks and where should rep performance be, and where, you know, where should you get payback and so forth. I think exactly like you're thinking about this is right. It's like, sure, this is interesting to know. But our baseline is this, and we need to figure out how we're going to increase that baseline step by step, right? Because if you do it the other way around, it's going to be ultra intangible for those sales leaders, for those marketing leaders to actually figure out how to go from A to B. But lifting the baseline that you have right there, I think it makes it much easier for, for anyone to execute.
[00:32:21] Right. And I really, really liked the idea of almost abandoning, adding more people and instilling this belief in the organization that no, we actually, with the same resource, we can actually do more. Let's just kind of push further in that direction. Right. And this then, you know, obviously led me to the, to the, to the next question here, which is like.
[00:32:40] Well, what we're thinking, so what are things, and you don't need to talk specifically about specific vendors, but what are areas where you believe AI can add additional let's call it efficiencies for your, for your go to market teams.
[00:32:54] Kevin: There's a couple areas where we're looking now, and one is just on pure, like, admin side of things. And, I mean, what is I mean, not even a sales rep, but anybody's most valuable resource. I don't care if they're a CSM, RevOps, professional, AE, it's time. It's time. And if you can help effectively free up time for prospect and customer engagement, planning for interactions, working on proposals, that's gold.
[00:33:27] And so looking at solutions that help free up admin. time. And, and that, that also helps deliver like trustworthy data at the same time is, is one area. Another area is just customer insight in general. And if you consider it from just my selfish perspective, the, the, the team I have, most people are speaking English as a second language, maybe even a third or a fourth I, I'm like. A quarter to a half fluent in Italian, but Italy is not our, our target market. So it doesn't really help me in this, in this, in this role and either joining customer calls or reviewing recorded calls in German, Swedish, Finnish, Dutch, like that's, that's hard for me in my own role, but it's also hard for like product teams and executives to get all of this, this customer insight. So being able to leverage. AI technology to help with things like transcripts, but also extracting key data points and having AI find like themes and trends. One, one thing that we've, we've done recently is we had some adjustments to a pricing model coming into the year and leveraging kind of AI summarization of, of call transcripts. I'm able to, to get an assessment that hey, our team has started positioning this and then you get prospect and customer kind of reactions to it and like how are they reacting to this. You can start to see like what red flag areas are, are, are there things that are coming up as objections and, and, and there's a lot of different applications to this.
[00:35:17] But I think if I were to step back. Without getting too detailed, two areas would be one efficiency and helping with kind of admin freeing up time. And the other area is like prospect and customer insight to just learn what's happening across your prospect and customer base. Understanding objections, understanding trends, understanding themes perhaps with your customer base, looking at things around like churn risk and like red flags that can hopefully help with like net retention and, and churn topics, which we haven't even touched on. But those are the two areas where we're looking now.
[00:35:54] Toni: On, on the back of that. So I think that makes total sense. I think, you know, top of mind for many people is also, you know, Automating some of the reach out work or the sales work or the CS and support work. Is that anything that, that you believe in? Because it's, it's, it's at this point, it's almost kind of a belief system of this can actually even work.
[00:36:16] Kevin: It depends. I think automation. and efficiency gains of engagement can be a very good thing. If you're asking me whether I think we need to go full out on like AISDRs and taking my entire target market and sending everybody an email that's, again, like air quote, it's been personalized because LinkedIn page and all of a sudden, I mean, how many of these posts on LinkedIn do you see of, of People talking about their playbook, how they sent a million emails to get 500 meetings and
[00:36:55] it's, I just think we're, everybody's trying to find the easy button and AI certainly makes things easier. But I also think it can be applied in the wrong way. And just because something is easier, I don't think makes it better, particularly with prospects and customers who, who are. Humans at the end of the day, like we're not robots selling to robots. And I think like that needs to be taken into consideration and that I still think like our own sales development team, which is, it's a, it's a small, it's a small but, but mighty team at, at DealFront. They still do, like we, we use sequencing capability. We have automation. But. They're still doing a lot of the personalization on their own. And there might be people listening that think I'm thinking backwards or not getting with the times. And maybe some of that's true. But I think for where we are right now, I still think it requires like critical human thinking to do some of this engagement in in an ethical, but I think also an effective way.
[00:37:59] Mikkel: we're kind of nearing slowly the end.
[00:38:01] And one of the things I found pretty curious maybe you just touch upon as well, and obviously you're going to be super biased, is the tenure of CROs is notoriously low. I, I think the post discussing whether the role should even exist has kind of, it's kind of, Evaporated by now, that whole discussion, but I'm just curious to look at the flip side and understand what has it enabled you and the team to do you having, you know, been in this function for a longer time than the average.
[00:38:30] What, what, what kind of insights can you share there?
[00:38:33] Kevin: Yeah, so, so what, what is the stat right now? Last I saw it was
[00:38:36] like 15 or 16 months, something like that.
[00:38:40] yeah, so, so I, I'm, I'm coming up on, on about two and a half years at this point. And I, I think for my organization and, and my team, hopefully what it means is, is continuity. And the ability to execute against longer term initiatives and, and learn from it. And work to make that better. And I know that might be a bit kind of unique to the merger situation we're in, which I know is not representative of probably 98 percent of the people listening to this. But, I think in any organization, particularly can be to be SAS and tech right now, when so much is changing, and the playbook from two or three years ago, just is not the same now.
[00:39:29] And like, all organizations are learning and making mistakes along the way. And if you don't give organizations the opportunity to learn from those mistakes, you end up bringing in new leaders and other teammates, for that matter, who haven't experienced that firsthand. Maybe they learn from, from what other people have done, but then they're going to go on and make their own mistakes as well.
[00:39:55] And then learn from that. I just think it, it, it, it, it provides kind of like a stuttering of, of the organization. And I think continuity is important and unless there's obvious like cultural fit or reasons why somebody shouldn't be there, I think if you're making an investment in, into somebody who's gonna help empower people, kinda lead from the front and, and learn and grow along the way, you have to be thinking beyond the 12 to 15 months. So I, I hope it's enabled our organization to learn from our mistakes, to have a level of continuity, hopefully earn some trust as well. So I can have great professional relationships with, with my teammates as we tackle problems together.
[00:40:39] Mikkel: So I guess if we're gonna, if we're gonna summarize this episode, if you want to lift AR per rep, just do a merger. It's easy. Just merge two companies. Then that's, that's the way to go. I also, by the way, wanted to double back to another thing you said. It's like, you've listened to, you've listened to the show.
[00:40:57] You're an avid listener. You've obviously also reviewed the show. You're nodding
[00:41:01] Kevin: five stars on Spotify.
[00:41:04] Toni: There you
[00:41:04] go.
[00:41:04] Mikkel: And obviously, dear listener, if you enjoyed this show, you should also go ahead. Give us a review. It helps us a great deal. Hopefully also get more guests such as Kevin on the show.
[00:41:13] I don't have any more questions, actually, Toni, do you have anything before we kind of call it? So, so think it's gonna, I don't think it's going to work out on the timeframe here. Thank you so much for joining. I think this was really insightful, really much from the front lines, not just some thought leader, consultant talking about some ideas, but someone actually doing this stuff.
[00:41:35] Toni: So I think this was really refreshing also for everyone listening. So Kevin, thank you so much for joining and sharing your
[00:41:39] story.
[00:41:40] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:41:40] Kevin: I appreciate you having me. Thank you so much.
[00:41:43] Toni: Have a good one. Bye Bye
[00:41:44] Mikkel: bye.