The Revenue Engine Framework: Volume, Value and Velocity Explained | TFOS E11

In this episode of The Future of Selling, Rick Smith sits down with Kara Smith Brown—CEO and Founder of LeadCoverage, Ironman triathlete, and author of The Revenue Engine. Kara shares her no-fluff, practical framework for aligning marketing with business outcomes by measuring volume, value, and velocity.

They dive deep into:

• Why most marketing-sourced data falls flat in the boardroom 
• How to truly align sales and marketing through pipeline velocity 
• The power of intent data, ABM, and programmatic media buying 
• Her journey from corporate roles to entrepreneurship 
• Why "share good news, track interest, and follow up" is the core of modern B2B marketing 
• And yes, how she turned being underestimated into Ironman motivation

Whether you're a marketing leader, CRO, or entrepreneur looking to generate real pipeline with precision, this episode is packed with insights you can actually use.

📚 Grab Kara Smith Brown’s book The Revenue Engine: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1642259098/

📍 Catch Kara Smith Brown on the road at her nationwide workshop tour: https://info.leadcoverage.com/the-revenue-engine-workshop-2025

🤝 Connect with Kara Smith Brown on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karasmithbrown/

💡 Learn More About Conquer: https://conquer.io/

🤝 Connect with Rick Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-smith-094b29b
 

Creators and Guests

Host

Rick Smith

Chief Customer Officer at Conquer, Host of The Future of Selling Podcast, Eternal Student

What is The Future of Selling?

The Future of Selling is the go-to podcast for sales professionals looking to sharpen their skills and stay ahead in the competitive world of B2B sales. Each episode features expert interviews, real-world case studies, and actionable tips to help you navigate the complex B2B buyer's journey. Whether you're dealing with long sales cycles, multiple decision-makers, or rapidly changing technologies, we’ve got you covered. Tune in to discover the latest trends, best practices, and proven strategies for closing more deals and building lasting relationships in the B2B space. Perfect for sales leaders, account managers, and anyone aiming to master the art of B2B selling.

Future Of Selling (00:02.102)
All right. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Future of Selling podcast. You know, on our podcast, we look at trends and innovations and, you know, anything that impacts the future of sales or the sales landscape. And my name is Rick Smith. I'm your host today. Very excited about our guest, Kara Smith Brown. So give you a little bit about Kara. Kara is a distinguished leader in B2B marketing and go-to-market strategies. It's pretty impressive. I like that.

CEO and founder of Lead Coverage, which is really cool. We'll talk more about that, I'm sure. I also like this one. You're the author of a book called The Revenue Engine. So I'm a little bit of an, kind of got this thing. I want to write a book one day. that kind of makes it give me a cool factor. I also like the fact, and we'll definitely jump into this, that you took your book and you turned it into a framework and that you're helping people with that, which is great. So Kara, welcome. Great to have you here.

Kara Brown (00:59.63)
Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, it's a pleasure.

Future Of Selling (01:02.318)
Yeah, I'm glad you're here. We're gonna have a great conversation. I'm really interested in this topic. So hopefully I do it justice and it's gonna be great. I do like to start with a couple of fun facts though, if that's okay. Just, you know, cause I want people to kind of know who you are. I great resume without a doubt, right? But also just to kind of know a little bit about you. So two things I picked up and you can add to it if you want, but you're an Ironman triathlete. Is that correct?

Kara Brown (01:28.238)
That is true, yes, I finished the Iron Man Moo, they call it Moo, Iron Man Wisconsin 2009.

Future Of Selling (01:35.854)
2009, okay, good deal. Did you, you had fun? You set any records? It was just like personal achievement? What was the story?

Kara Brown (01:43.257)
I did not set any records. It was personal achievement for sure. I'm a goal-oriented person and a guy that I went to high school with that I had a crush on told me that I wasn't athletic enough to do it. Yeah, that's really the reason why I did it is that I to prove this guy wrong. So I did.

Future Of Selling (01:47.918)
All right.

Future Of Selling (01:57.198)
Really?

Future Of Selling (02:03.022)
So if someone tells you you can't, you're leaning in, right?

Kara Brown (02:06.83)
That it is 100 % what drives me and the people in my life that know me very well have actually used it against me.

Future Of Selling (02:16.917)
Well, I don't know if we'll get into any of those stories, but I'd love to hear them if we, know, maybe afterwards, but...

Kara Brown (02:22.222)
It is an easy way to get me to do something is to say that it can't be done. Yeah.

Future Of Selling (02:27.205)
That's awesome, I like that. The other fun fact that I found out was that you're the co-founder of an organization called CloseHer. I wrote it down like CloseHeader and I'm like, no, no, no, that's CloseHer.

Kara Brown (02:39.576)
Close, yeah, instead of close.

Kara Brown (02:46.158)
Yeah, I should probably take this off my bio because we haven't resurrected it since the pandemic. But pandemic Jordan Araghetti and I, she was one of the top, actually the top rep at sales loft at the time. She was looking for women in sales to like build her network. And I said, Hey, let's just do this. Let's, let's make this happen in Atlanta. And so we did. So we on for a couple of years and we had a couple hundred women on our list and it was awesome. We had a blast.

Future Of Selling (02:51.896)
Okay.

Future Of Selling (03:05.378)
Yes.

Yeah.

Future Of Selling (03:14.168)
Wow, that's really cool. And the reason that always grabs my attention, I've interviewed a couple of people who have organizations like that that serve specifically women. My daughter, she's 33 years old and she's in sales, right? And she's in an industry that pretty male dominated, right? And so anyway, I'm always interested in that kind of stuff and trying to give her things to watch and things to look at because she's really good at what she does and just, it's such a difference maker. So anyway.

Kara Brown (03:42.382)
I have two daughters and they are 11 and 12 and one of them will sell.

Future Of Selling (03:44.994)
Okay.

Kara Brown (03:52.217)
She's got the bug, she's got all the skills, and we tell her this. We're like, honey, you're gonna sell, I want you to sell the most expensive thing that you can possibly sell. She's like, diamonds! And I'm like, no, no, no. Other people's businesses. So, her track is already set in life. Because she will sell. She goes to the dog park and she knows everybody's name and she's good girl. She's great, she's awesome.

Future Of Selling (04:02.136)
Yeah.

Future Of Selling (04:08.099)
Then.

Future Of Selling (04:16.024)
Yeah, that's cool. That's cool. Well, I hope you get the chance to start the organization back up because I know there's a lot. just. Yeah, well, then that's like me telling you what you should do. there you go. All right. Good deal. Well, let's jump into it. The topic interests me a lot, right? Because I'm chief customer officer now, but I spent about a year or so in an interim CRO role. Right. So I had sales and customer success.

Kara Brown (04:23.582)
I should. Yeah, nothing to mention now. should put some effort behind it.

Future Of Selling (04:45.966)
else. so during that timeframe, learned a lot about more about marketing than I'd ever known before. And just some of the some of the dip, I don't know, some of the alignment you talk about alignment issues with with marketing and sales and things like that. So really interested to hear your point of view on a few things. Let me ask this. One of the things I read was about the alignment of marketing and business outcomes. So how do you align marketing with business outcomes? And the reason I'm asking in my experience,

marketing, the outcomes you see from marketing are soft, right? They're not as easy to see, not as easy to put your finger on. Like, did you renew the client? Did you not renew the client in the customer success world? Different from marketing. So anyway, talk about that a little bit. How do you align marketing initiatives with business outcomes?

Kara Brown (05:31.823)
Yeah, so the book is, I have it here with me, it's called The Revenue Engine, a little pit break. Actually, I wrote the book and I got my first check from Forbes for my residuals from the book and it was like $300. So you don't have, it doesn't actually pay me a lot of money, but I'm really glad we had it. The last third of the book talks about this in depth and it's all about measuring volume, velocity and value in the pipe.

Future Of Selling (05:36.302)
I love it, I love it. I'm gonna get.

Future Of Selling (05:51.875)
Yeah.

Future Of Selling (06:02.424)
volume a lot

Kara Brown (06:02.454)
So I volume, value and velocity in the pipeline. So we call it the three B's. And I believe that if you can, as a marketer, if you can show up to the meeting with having one volume, one value and one velocity metric that you track, just start there. This is the bare minimum. You can track one of these. You will come to the table with a point of view that very few marketers bring to the table regularly. So.

Volume is how many, right? How many are in any stage of the funnel, right? So you wanna do top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom of funnel, whatever it is. How many, and are we agreed on that as a team, how much is that phase of the funnel worth? And this question of what is our average deal size, ARR, LTV, whatever you wanna call it, is usually a question that our clients can't answer.

So when we say, hey, what's your average deal size? It's like, oh, anywhere from 3000 to 3 million. We're like, that's not an average, that's a number, right? What is the number? Like give me the number. And so oftentimes if a marketer brings these three metrics to the table, it will spark a conversation. And the conversation can end with, okay, this is now what we're agreed to measure. But most of the time the marketer isn't the one bringing the math.

Future Of Selling (07:07.481)
that.

Future Of Selling (07:10.946)
Yes.

Future Of Selling (07:18.605)
Okay.

Kara Brown (07:28.822)
And so they're always on their heels, right? Show me what you got. Show me like, what have you done for me lately? What are you promising me, right? And instead show up with your own map, have your own point of view and ask the rest of the folks in the room the hard question. Hey, you're gonna hold me accountable for my campaigns. I'm gonna hold you accountable for our average deals.

Future Of Selling (07:49.186)
Yeah, yeah, got it. So I really like that statement, show up with your own point of view, right? Don't be on your heels. Such a, just a critically important piece of it. Otherwise, you're right, you're always gonna be the person that shows up and they're just piling on, right? So how many, how much, average ARR, whatever the metric is, and then velocity, yeah, talk about that a little bit, velocity.

Kara Brown (08:16.546)
Velocity is how fast? And what's really interesting is that velocity requires a little bit more than the other two, right? It requires CRM, it requires diligence by your sales team. You want to hold the sales team accountable, start measuring velocity. Because you measure velocity in a pipeline if your sales team isn't tracking what they're doing every day, right? And so you say, hey sales team, I know you want to hold me accountable for my leads, but...

Future Of Selling (08:18.51)
How's that?

Future Of Selling (08:32.054)
Okay.

Future Of Selling (08:37.07)
Yeah.

Kara Brown (08:41.942)
Once I deliver these leads to you, how fast are they moving through the pipeline? I'll never know because you're not tracking your activity, right? And so the velocity metric is usually one where both marketing and sales teams can come together and they can say, okay, sales have to track their activity so that marketing can track the velocity. And we're all on the same page that we're trying to measure how many days in the pipeline or days from first touch to close or days inside an RFP, right?

Future Of Selling (08:47.756)
Right. Right.

Kara Brown (09:10.998)
And all of those velocity metrics, they're all really kind of hard to measure, which is why we like to start with one.

Future Of Selling (09:17.56)
Okay, got it, got it, got it. Okay, and so, and you said that velocity is a measurement that typically brings sales and marketing together. So when you say that, are you saying just brings the activity together or actually brings the group together in alignment in a way that they're working well together also?

Kara Brown (09:35.747)
Yeah, the latter, right? Like if we are all aligned around trying to improve velocity, which is a from a senior leadership perspective, this is a point of view that they would appreciate from the marketing team, right? Hey, I'm the marketer. I would like to increase how fast our top of funnel leads become closed deals. And that's a project that I want to work on boss. And they're like, great, that sounds awesome. That can always be improved, right? How are you going to do that?

Well, first, you have to benchmark where you are today. And if you can't see the velocity in the CRM because the sales team is in tracking activity, which is really the only thing that is, you know, velocity makes sense. I mean, that's an easy metric for you to say, Hey sales team, in order for me to move things faster, I need you to be diligent in your tracking in the CRM because velocity is only a measure of time. You can only understand time if we're tracking all of the activities in the CRM.

Future Of Selling (10:35.65)
breast, right?

Kara Brown (10:35.702)
So it's a cool place for marketing and sales to meet.

Future Of Selling (10:39.16)
Yeah, well, and it's a good, it's a good idea. I like that because really, and you know this much better than I do, to get to a closed state, mean, yeah, everybody wants it to go to a closed one, but man, get it to, know, velocity on closed, closed lost as well, right? Because you just don't want all that junk in your, your, in your pipeline that's not ever going to go anywhere, nor do you want to spend time talking about it. Every time you do that, that's a waste of time and effort. So.

Kara Brown (11:07.726)
So when you get real sophisticated, which is not where you should start, but much further along in a sales and marketing team's time together, You can start to measure time to disqualify. You should be disqualifying super fast, and there should be a ratio of qualified to disqualified that is more disqualified than qualified, right?

Future Of Selling (11:20.824)
Okay.

Kara Brown (11:33.039)
because all of that opportunity cost of trying to market and sell to someone who's never going to buy from you to begin with is actually where the business is spending money. Enterprise value is lost inside opportunity cost. So you can shrink the ICP, if you can get hyper specific on who you should be reaching out to, and you can kill anything that isn't qualified immediately because you're tracking velocity of close loss and you're rewarding it, right?

you can get faster deals with better potential customers.

Future Of Selling (12:04.782)
Got it. Got it. Okay. Yep. Good point. All right. Cool. So tell me about the revenue engine. Well, one, tell me about the book, right? What caused you to write it? What got you there? But then also just the framework itself. You what was the genesis of all this for you? I would assume it probably the, am I right? Did the framework come first and then the book came after? Is that how it worked or was it the opposite?

Kara Brown (12:31.054)
I so. think we need, we as a company needed a way to, it actually an internal problem. Our internal problem was our people, we would hire these bright marketers and they would come in and they would use all of their bad habits. So we would say, hey, this is how we do things here at Lead Coverage. And then they would like add their own spin on it and be like, no, no, no, no, no. Like we don't do it like that. You got to stay in our box. So we needed to write, we needed to write the how we do it.

Future Of Selling (12:55.874)
Yeah, yeah.

Kara Brown (12:59.82)
Right? So first we kind of wrote that how we do it, try to train our people on it. And then I follow a podcast called Two Bobs. They talk about the art of selling expertise. And they said, Hey, if you just share it all, share all of your expertise, write the books, give it all away. When your potential customers come back into you to become a customer, they are pre-qualified and they will pay you more money. You will be able to charge a premium because you are the expert.

and it has worked. So I wrote it. People were asking, like, why are you writing a book? That seems like a lot of work, right? And it was a ton of work. And I said, one day, one of the big guys, we only do logistics and transportation, so we're very much in the supply chain space. I said, one day, one of the big guys is going to say, hey, we should hire this lady. And they're going to say why. They're going to drop the book. They're like, because she wrote the book on it. And it actually has already happened. Yeah.

Future Of Selling (13:31.864)
Okay.

Future Of Selling (13:54.06)
Right. my gosh.

Kara Brown (13:57.613)
I came out in November and a couple of the big guys had reached out being like, hey, you wrote this awesome book and we want to hire you to consult for us, which is exactly what you want a book like this to do.

Future Of Selling (14:06.46)
my gosh, so you wrote it in November of 2024. It came out and already you've gotten a, wow.

Kara Brown (14:14.062)
You won. Yeah, you won. five months into, I mean, it's an Amazon bestseller. The other thing is we are super niche, right? We only do supply chain. So sending this book into the marketplace was relatively easy because I had built an audience, right? So I had been sharing for years and years and years on what we do and how we do it. I had been sharing the methodology. I had been sharing the framework, but no one really like could put it all together because it's like.

big, complicated, and it's demand gen, right? And so when I shared the book, like actually getting like published, the support team ecosystem were so kind. Like they just tripped over themselves to making an Amazon bestseller and to be super kind about it. And so yeah, we're on stages. We've written the workbook that goes with it. So now we have an 80 page workbook that we're taking on the road show. We're doing workshops. Like it's just, it's been such a great experience. It really has.

Future Of Selling (14:49.197)
Right.

Future Of Selling (15:08.846)
Yeah, that's great. So is it more of a how-to book or is it more of a fable with how-to? I haven't read the book yet, but now you've got me intrigued and I want to.

Kara Brown (15:17.358)
Yeah, so it's definitely a how-to. It's a nine process. So it's nine chapters and then there's a chapter on AI, of course. So it's a how-to, but there are three funny stories in the book that are actually like kind of hilarious. The first is how we change boys into girls to get truck drivers to open emails.

Future Of Selling (15:44.888)
Alright, I like that one, that's good.

Kara Brown (15:45.743)
First, the second story is how I trapped my husband into marrying me. And so I use the dating scene in Chicago as an example of a marketing funnel. And then the last one is how I was fired from being Girl Scout Cookie Mom, as I got a little overzealous.

Future Of Selling (15:55.022)
Okay.

Future Of Selling (16:11.842)
Right.

Kara Brown (16:15.028)
on selling cookies online. And I equate that to volume, velocity and value. there are really like moments of my personality that come out in the book. It doesn't read like a textbook. It's actually pretty fun. Yeah, I've got lot of compliments on like, hey, it's really easy to read and you like your personality comes through, which is really fun.

Future Of Selling (16:29.474)
Yeah. Okay.

Future Of Selling (16:34.734)
Yeah, that's good. That's good. Yeah, I'm gonna pick it up then, right? Great.

Kara Brown (16:40.108)
Okay. It's free on Spotify. You can just listen to it. It's me. It's six hours of me talking, which is kind of annoying. Yeah.

Future Of Selling (16:46.158)
Okay, because I work out a lot, right, and do that kind of stuff. Podcasts and books are my thing every morning, every morning. So yeah, if I can get it there, I'll do that then. Perfect. So hey, so dive in, if you will, a little bit. I'm looking over here because I've got the framework sitting here, right? Methodology, funnels of measure. So dive into the framework a little bit. As much as you feel comfortable, why don't we give away the secrets in the book?

Kara Brown (16:53.474)
Yeah.

Kara Brown (17:13.358)
I wrote a book on it. We can do it. Yeah. So the methodology is the first three pieces. So I want you to think of the revenue engine as a nine step process. I really hate that it's nine, but it really needed to be nine. I wish it was three, but it's three big chunks. So the first chunk is the methodology, which is share good news, track interest, follow up. So I'm a marketer. You will not hear the B word out of my mouth. We don't use the word brand. So.

Future Of Selling (17:15.822)
OK.

Future Of Selling (17:38.925)
Okay.

Kara Brown (17:39.599)
Here are good news is everything that is sort of in the content world. We don't love the word content. Lots of people have bad experiences with content agencies and with ChatGPT what it is today, no one is paying for content, right? But we are paying for sharing good news. So really understanding what your ideal customer profile wants to hear and then sharing that with them. Two is tracking interest, which is everything that happens inside of your CRM, marketing funnel, et cetera, and then follow up.

Future Of Selling (17:50.466)
Yeah. Yeah.

Future Of Selling (18:06.614)
Okay.

Kara Brown (18:07.282)
a bunch of cool stuff, lots of stats around follow-up and how we follow up at the coverage, etc. The second section are the funnels. We believe that there is a prospect funnel, which is where your strangers go, a nurture funnel, which is who you're marketing to, and your customer funnel, which is cross-sell upsell. And then the last three of the funnel we talked about, which is volume, velocity, and value, and how you measure all of the activity that you're doing inside the funnels using the methodology, share good news, track interest, follow-up.

Future Of Selling (18:12.216)
Yes.

Future Of Selling (18:23.576)
Okay.

Future Of Selling (18:35.022)
Got it. So if I were somebody who grabbed your book, right, or I grabbed the framework and I'm like, I love this. Is there a logical place to start? I mean, is it a big bang? Like, hey, Rick, go do all of it at one time. Have fun with that. Or is there a logical kind of waterfall, do this first, which kind of brick upon brick, build it. How does the program implement this? Okay.

Kara Brown (18:55.266)
Yeah, it definitely builds on itself. The number one thing that we talk about in the book that you absolutely have to do is understand your ideal customer profile. So you have an exercise on how to execute understanding your ideal customer profile, demographic versus behavioral, your ICP versus your persona, which are two different things. And then how to really understand your TAM, like what is the total addressable market? We don't get into like TAM, SAM, SOM.

Future Of Selling (19:04.845)
Okay.

Kara Brown (19:25.122)
that's pretty like SaaS specific, right? And so what we kind of do is we use the best practices from the SaaS community. And I spent two years reading every book written by every SaaS seller, right? And we apply it then to this kind of old school B2B, specifically supply chain ecosystem. so we're kind of taking the best of the SaaS world and applying it, but we're really making it simpler.

Future Of Selling (19:39.01)
Yeah.

Future Of Selling (19:45.4)
Okay.

Kara Brown (19:53.913)
How do we make this as simple as possible? So yeah, you should be able to take the book and kind of apply it inside your work.

Future Of Selling (19:59.34)
Okay, okay, so if I were to do that though, you get the three, it's really nine, but you kind of get these three buckets, methodology, funnels, and measure. Would I start with methodology first? Is that kind of how you would, and then I would move to funnels, then I would move to measurement, right? Okay.

Kara Brown (20:15.928)
Same way the book is written. Yeah, although I do wish there was a world where I could move the measurement to the front because I think people kind of give up on the book at some point. I always do. I kind of like give up on a book after I'm like, okay, I've had enough, right? And the last third is so important. Like, it's just so important because I say this in the book a lot. Finance is the language of the boardroom. And if you are not bringing

Future Of Selling (20:23.875)
Yeah.

Future Of Selling (20:34.796)
Right.

Kara Brown (20:45.978)
ROI specific math to the boardroom, you will get asked to leave the boardroom. And so I think really important is this measurement component. And if I could, I would switch it, but it doesn't make any sense to switch it.

Future Of Selling (20:49.07)
Yeah. Yeah.

Future Of Selling (20:58.638)
Right, right. No, it makes perfect sense. Have you... And so give me maybe an example with someone that you've worked with, know, one of your clients, right? And you don't have to say who it is, obviously, but give me an example. Give me a success story. They were here. We implemented the framework over X amount of time, and then this was the result of that. you know, give me one of those.

Kara Brown (21:21.678)
Yeah, so I won't name the client because I haven't really asked their permission to share it on this podcast. I have so many good case studies. I think my favorite is actually in the book, it's ITS Logistics, I guess I won't name them because they're published in the book, so I appreciate them being willing to share their story with our audience. When we walked into ITS Logistics, they're a freight brokerage. And if you know anything about the freight world, they're

Future Of Selling (21:26.722)
All good.

Kara Brown (21:50.543)
lots and lots and lots of freight brokerages, like five to 15,000 of them. So what do you do that's different than everybody else? Kind like a dentist. Like what do you do that's different than anybody else? Like clean teeth, right? Like you move freight. It turns out that they do this one very specific thing more than anybody else. It's called Dreyage, and where you take the actual container off the boat and put it on a truck. And so they do it all 26 ports, and that's weird. Like doing it all over the country is kind of weird. Normally you have like one or two places you do this.

Future Of Selling (21:59.192)
Yeah. Yeah.

Future Of Selling (22:11.726)
Congrats.

Kara Brown (22:18.744)
And so we said, OK, well, do you have math on this? And they said, yes. So we put together the very sexy and exciting ITS Port Rail Ramp Index. Still happening today. And we share this index with the marketplace. This good news is exactly what their ideal customer profile is looking for when they're trying to solve their internal problems. A good example is tariffs. Right? Just happened. Right?

Future Of Selling (22:41.752)
Okay.

Kara Brown (22:45.774)
So, hey, there's this new tariff thing happening, which will continue to happen for the next three and a half years. We plenty of news coming out of DC, right? So this is happening. What's the impact on the overall supply chain? And how do I take that impact and change my operational processes inside of my business as a shipper? And so they're looking to this index for one of the many points that they're gonna use to change the way that they're going to market. So this is a really good example of

Future Of Selling (22:53.404)
Yes.

Kara Brown (23:15.168)
share good news. Then we take the good news and we run it through the HubSpot engine, make a dial against it, and we can track the activity of the inbound records or cross-sell upsell opportunity from this very specific activity. So when we started with them, they weren't really putting anything into the marketplace, and now they are, and it's been hundreds of millions that we can attribute back to this index.

Future Of Selling (23:37.936)
wow, and directly, it's not, you know, they're not like, well, that's good, but it's kind of fuzzy. I mean, they're got, they're absolutely, A connects to B for them.

Kara Brown (23:46.927)
Yeah, so the short answer is yes. The long answer is attribution is always a journey in B2B. Right? Like there's never a, hey, this is why, know, there's always a brother's uncle dog walker that knew someone or saw someone at a trade show. But in total, we know that this index is moving the needle on behalf of their team. And it's also making it easier for them to sell other things too, right? Because now they're a known brand where before,

Future Of Selling (24:14.168)
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. so, and so there, so the index you created came from it really, I guess it's in the methodology piece, but that, that, that pushed through to the funnel to measurement, the whole, I mean, the whole thing. Okay.

Kara Brown (24:28.686)
Right, yeah, the whole thing. So sharing good news. And good news doesn't have to be your press release. It doesn't have to be your newest hire. It doesn't have to be a case study. Good news is just your point of view on something that your customer cares about. That's it.

Future Of Selling (24:46.104)
Yeah. Well, that's a really good qualifier too, right? Because I think sometimes from a marketing standpoint, we're just trying to come up with cool things to say, cool things to represent. But your qualifier is, no, no, it needs to be something that good news is what your customer wants to hear about. It's what gets them going. If you were in a highly regulated

industry, then maybe it's they want to hear about security or whatever it may be. Is this only, you feel like your framework is only applicable to the logistics transportation or is it applicable

Kara Brown (25:31.375)
I was so happy. I've been home for a few days. I'm on the road a lot. I've been home for a few days and I've been doing a lot of podcasts as I've been at home, right? I've had more than one person tell me that the book has made it into someone's hands who is not logistics oriented. I talked to a woman in California who got her hands on it and she runs an energy company. I talked to someone else who has a client in the Midwest that does potholes. They help with potholes.

Future Of Selling (25:38.232)
Right. Yeah.

Future Of Selling (25:46.552)
Nice!

Future Of Selling (26:00.756)
okay, yeah.

Kara Brown (26:01.326)
So I think it's made its way into other markets. It will not help anyone in B2C. There's no B2C content in it at all. If you are selling B2B, the book is applicable for anyone that kind of is in this space.

Future Of Selling (26:10.104)
But okay, okay.

Future Of Selling (26:17.806)
Okay, good. Let's dive in a little bit further and talk about intent data, right? And talk about ABM. Are you a big fan of ABM? Not a big fan? Talk about it. We've done some stuff with ABM. For me, again, it's one of those things that's hard to understand sometimes the impact of that. So I need you to teach me.

Kara Brown (26:26.926)
Huge fan.

Kara Brown (26:41.588)
man. I love I love intent data. So ABM and intent data are associated but not the same thing. So when I share some education around intent data, I like to use the word ABM as the word health care, right? just health care, ABM is like giant word, right? What does it really mean? We like to pull out just the intent data portion and talk about that. So account based marketing is targeted, it's specific, it's personalized, etc.

But the piece that we really like to talk about is intent data and programmatic media buying. And if you're not doing programmatic media buying, you're not really doing a fully, fully fledged ABM motion, right? And so people talk about, yeah, we're doing ABM. And then we get in and we're like, this is just targeted selling.

Future Of Selling (27:24.622)
press.

Future Of Selling (27:30.318)
tell us what programmatic media buying is.

Kara Brown (27:33.923)
Yes. So programmatic media buying comes from one of the ABM or intent data tools. Our favorite is Sixth Sense. If you can't afford Sixth Sense, like RollWorks, Demandbase, Terminix. There's a whole bunch of them now, right? They are looking for the buying signal inside of the ideal customer profiles that you tell it to look for. And they are surrounding that human, not the company, but the human being with advertising specific

to what you would like to show that person. it's a really cool, it's awesome, and I'll give you an actual case study on how it worked for one of our clients. So the caveat to great programmatic media buying and intent data is that it really works best for enterprise customers. So these are billion plus, really like making big decisions, right? So if you think about my network, I'm in supply chain. So I want you to imagine,

We're talking about, I don't know, Nike, Whole Foods, right? Like big brands, right? That have like big supply chain needs. So we work for a consultancy, essentially, big, huge consultancy. So think the McKinsey of warehousing, right? And so they are, they're looking only for like Fortune 100, Fortune 50. So we load up their list of their prospect customers.

Future Of Selling (28:37.677)
Yeah.

Kara Brown (29:00.364)
and we see that their customers are surging, which is the intent data word for looking for the keywords on robots, very specific robots. Now we don't sell robots. That's not what we sell. We sell warehouse consulting, but the robots are a signal that something is happening inside the supply chain. So let's get in front of these people before they pick the robot.

and let's see if we can help them choose the right robot, help them implement that, et cetera. So loaded up the list, boom, there are 15 of these companies that are surging on a very specific robot. My PR team then re-releases the press announcement for a partnership that happened in 2021. We get new fanfare, we get new pickup in the press, we have new good news to share, and we have five of those 15 from Target all the way up to 6QA or Opportunity.

Future Of Selling (29:46.776)
Right.

Future Of Selling (29:52.654)
Yeah.

Future Of Selling (29:58.584)
Wow. Yeah.

Kara Brown (29:58.863)
And yeah, it was awesome. then humans at those businesses, because we're executing programmatic media, the human beings at those businesses are seeing this messaging, right? All over the internet, wherever they go, one guy clicks on it and they close a deal for a crazy amount of money, billion dollars, whatever it is. And so the point is we are listening for the keywords that are not always specific to our business.

Future Of Selling (30:28.609)
Okay.

Kara Brown (30:29.314)
Same example for ITS Logistics. They are sending out an index on DRAEGE, but DRAEGE is just one part of what they do. They're a fully integrated supply chain management company. They can do everything from DRAEGE to full truckload, to small parcel, to warehouse, to contract negotiation. They can do it all, but they go to market to this one specific node because they have a problem they can solve.

My warehouse customer also, same situation, we saw there were robots that needed to be purchased. Hey, what's changing in your supply chain that you might need robots? Can we help you with the whole thing?

Future Of Selling (31:09.154)
Right, got it, got it. Okay, so that's good. So you gotta be looking, so not just looking for keywords that are very specific to my end or my company, my industry, but I'm listening and I'm watching for those words that are tangential, can't say that word, to what we're doing as well because it lets me know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, got it.

Kara Brown (31:27.906)
You're really looking for pain. You're looking for any pain. If you can tell me where your pain is, I can maybe find a way to solve it. And if I can't solve it, maybe I'll give you someone else that can solve it. And then the next time you have a pain I can solve, you'll trust me a little more because I helped you solve the first pain. We are really looking for, we're looking for keywords that are surging that are pain-based.

Future Of Selling (31:36.45)
Yeah, got it.

Future Of Selling (31:52.325)
Okay, now that makes sense. makes sense. Okay. You mentioned a minute ago about AI and so how is AI, I it's everywhere now and everything we're doing, how is it impacting marketing and ABM and all the other things? What's happening there? What's going to happen there?

Kara Brown (32:13.176)
So I think AI is like, I'm all in. I love everything about it. There's a Kara Brown chat GBT. So we loaded up the whole book and then I post to LinkedIn every day. every new LinkedIn post goes into the LLM, the large language model. And then you can ask Kara Brown a question and we've trained it to only answer the way that I would answer. she doesn't use emojis, no prepositional phrases. She's very direct, right?

Future Of Selling (32:34.498)
Right. So.

Kara Brown (32:43.086)
Yeah, it's not very nice. She's very direct. Yeah, exactly. And so I think this is incredible. think we will continue to build these large language models for clients. I think I said this yesterday on a podcast, I think that no one should be paying for content anymore, right? We should content needs to be coming from the large language model, building the large language model we should pay for.

Future Of Selling (32:56.707)
Yeah.

Future Of Selling (33:03.778)
Right. Yeah.

Kara Brown (33:12.568)
and the distribution of the content we should pay for, but the physical execution of the chat bot that is now building this content for us, we should all be using this at scale. And we are, we use it internally. We have an incredible group of writers, and the writers, my team, are instructed to get started with a prompt. Don't look at a blank piece of paper. That's no longer your job.

Future Of Selling (33:36.824)
Yeah.

Kara Brown (33:39.471)
So I think it's coming. think the other thing that's super cool, which is tangentially related to AI, is all things psychographic profiling. So I just thought this was the coolest thing for the last, I think it's been at least four or five years. There's a tool called Crystal Nose, and if you type in to LinkedIn someone's name, you can see their disk profile before you even get on the phone with them. And I just think that is like,

Future Of Selling (33:49.464)
Okay.

Kara Brown (34:07.02)
the coolest thing ever. And I think it'll continue to develop and we'll have these psychographic profiles inside of HubSpot and we'll be able to see who you're getting in front of and what should they all look and feel like and should I have a deck and should I not have a deck and should I be brief. And I just, I love everything about preparing my reps with the best information they can have to solve the customer's problem as fast as possible and be the first to the deal.

Future Of Selling (34:16.195)
Yeah.

Future Of Selling (34:32.846)
Yeah. Yeah, that's cool. And I'm familiar with or at least have heard of that company. But I think I agree with you. think that's the next I mean, I think that's where it's going. And I'm with you as well on the AI. It is like the first thing I hit now. And it took me a little bit of time just like it took me a little bit of time to switch to, you know, know, Amazon delivery on the front porch. Right. And, know, it was just like that wasn't my first thought. Just go get it. But I got there. Right. And

And now with AI and whichever AI you use, it is the first place I go for anything and get the 70%, 80 % solution and then be able to personalize and customize and make it right. But it is just such a game changer. So it's awesome. So you worked for a long time, big corporate organizations, companies. What kind of caused you to make this switch to be the entrepreneur and write the book?

You know, just what's the trigger? What happened?

Kara Brown (35:34.316)
Yeah, full transparencies. I got fired a lot.

Future Of Selling (35:38.016)
Okay. And you get fired a lot. Crazy story. You're in your book,

Kara Brown (35:43.406)
Because this-

Yeah, like, I mean, I didn't get fired. I got fired twice. But like, I've always been this person, right? I've always been kind of aggressive and goal oriented and driven. And this personality doesn't really fit in a corporate culture. Like, they want you to be in your box and do what you're told and then bring your report to the meeting. And I have always tried to do like 10 things at once and be too many things. And I really, actually, my second to last boss, boss told me you really need to be in sales.

And I was like, no way, I'm a marketer. I'm a marketer by, passed forward 20 years. I am definitely a salesperson. Like I should definitely have sales. I will go back and work for him again and sell for him. see. But I think, yeah, I learned that I needed to have my own sandbox. And as a really goal oriented person, I needed to be able to set my own goals. It was not a fit for me to try to help

Future Of Selling (36:20.684)
Right.

Kara Brown (36:45.888)
a group achieve like a group goal and to have my piece be a little sliver. I needed to own the whole goal. And, and generally my goals are bigger than other people's. I was always stretching for more wanted to be more and yeah, kind of accidentally stumbled into entrepreneurship. And then a woman, friend of mine here in Atlanta, we moved here. She said, listen, we had a

Future Of Selling (36:58.232)
Okay.

Kara Brown (37:11.822)
We had about $400,000 in revenue. And I was at that turning point where either I could make a lot of money being an independent consultant. Like I could have a couple of clients and make a couple hundred grand a year, or I was going to have to hire people. And she said, this is the moment that you have to choose. You're either going to be a consultant, individual contributor, or you're going to be a CEO. And you can't be both. You can't be the doer.

Future Of Selling (37:37.208)
Right. Yeah.

Kara Brown (37:40.991)
and the leader. So if you want to be the leader, you've got a whole new set of skills you need to learn and you need to learn them fast. Here's the club that can help you with that. Or just stay individual contributor and like make a couple hundred grand a year and relax, right? But don't hurt people and try to build. And I really believe for that advice because I definitely chose the CEO track and I've learned so much in the last eight years.

Future Of Selling (37:56.908)
Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Kara Brown (38:09.902)
I've grown so much. truly believe that a business can only get as big as the, or can only grow as much as the founder grows. And I'm just having so much fun growing and meeting up entrepreneurs and spending time with them and being pushed by people. And it's just been awesome. I'm really enjoying it.

Future Of Selling (38:17.518)
The law's a limit, The law's a limit. That's it.

Future Of Selling (38:29.964)
Any specific, I do a mastermind on growth with a group of folks. So any specific kind of strategy you've got or things that you're doing to make sure that you're on this continual growth path, whether it's a CEO or business owner entrepreneur. I how do you, is it more random or do you have a plan that you follow on growth? I like it, it should be.

Kara Brown (38:51.406)
I have a plan. Who's always a plan? Yeah. Yeah. I'm part of the Entrepreneurs Organization, which most people know about. If you don't, it's incredible. What? 30,000 entrepreneurs around the globe. And it's the precursor to YPO. I kind of stopped doing the chapter stuff. sorry, EO Atlanta. kind of like, I'm doing chapter stuff and I really am diving into all of the international learning opportunities. So they do Harvard, Wharton.

Future Of Selling (39:09.998)
Ha!

Future Of Selling (39:16.898)
Okay.

Kara Brown (39:19.746)
London Business School, Oxford, like you can do a week a year or two weeks a year in all of these incredible learning opportunities. And so I've really taken advantage of that. And that's actually how the framework for the book came about. So yeah, I went to EO Harvard, which is five days at HBS Harvard Business School with Harvard professors. And we did 12 case studies in four days. was like, It was just.

Future Of Selling (39:34.206)
really?

Future Of Selling (39:46.402)
Well, that's a lot.

Kara Brown (39:48.111)
7 in the morning to midnight. It was so much learning. was just like crying me so much in. And every single case study we did had a framework. And I walked out of Harvard and I was like, I have to build, if I'm going to do this, if I'm really going to be this thought leader, if I'm really going to take this to the next level, I have to have a framework. And so was Harvard that taught me, hey, you need to have this, or you can't really write a book about it. You can't be the thought leader without it. And that was the inspiration.

Future Of Selling (39:51.448)
Yeah. Yeah.

Future Of Selling (40:16.674)
Yeah, that's awesome. I that's I love the frameworks, right? I mean, yeah, I can have a lot of great ideas, but but but it's hard to train someone else on it or or get somebody else on board without a framework to kind of hang everything on. You know, so anyway, that's incredible. That's cool. Well, I know we're probably have kept you longer than than I should have. Sorry about that. But here's the deal. We've covered a bunch of ground, right? We've talked about your entrepreneurship. We've talked about your, you know, the work you're doing.

with your business. I were, let's say I was a marketing, new marketing manager, right? And I came into a business and I'm like, it fills wheels off. What would be the top three things? Let's think about key takeaways. What would you tell me to focus on? What are the top three things you'd say, Rick, do this, do that, and do the other? What would that

Kara Brown (41:10.286)
I'm gonna spell it in a broken record, One is ideal customer profile. Write it down, get your leadership team to agree to it, and maybe more importantly is get everyone to agree to what it is not. I think sometimes it's easy to say, is our customer, and it's harder to get people to agree to who is not your customer. So it's a pretty easy exercise, just.

Future Of Selling (41:12.718)
All right.

Future Of Selling (41:16.59)
Okay.

Kara Brown (41:37.967)
flip it over and say, okay, who are we saying no to? Get everyone to align on that. That's the first one. And then the second is all the way back to measurement, right? We talked about this at the beginning of the podcast, like measure one volume, one value, one velocity metric, and bring a point of view to that meeting. And if you do it inside the framework, you can say, hey, we're gonna share good news, track interest and follow up against these specific IDO customer profiles. You're gonna measure.

Future Of Selling (41:40.963)
Yeah.

Kara Brown (42:07.65)
how many, how much, and how fast. And if you do that to a leadership meeting, they're gonna be like, this is a different kind of marketer. Like she didn't mention the color of the logo, she didn't mention the website, she hasn't mentioned social media, she didn't mention blog posts, she didn't mention swag, right? Like that is not what leadership wants to hear from you. What they wanna hear from you is how top line, how are you gonna contribute, and then however you get it done.

They don't really care. Nobody really cares about how many mugs you're going to buy or what the marketing email looks like. Nobody really cares. What they really care about is who are you talking to and how are you going to measure your activity? The actual activity itself is up to you. That's what they hired you to do.

Future Of Selling (42:38.498)
That is.

Future Of Selling (42:46.179)
Yeah.

Future Of Selling (42:56.472)
Yeah. Well, and I like one thing. I think you said this previously, right? One of the things that you're doing and I think you're talking about here is also keeping it simple. Don't bring me 30 metrics to look at. I don't want to see it. I don't understand it. I don't care. But give me the give me the three right that that I can follow with you. And by the way, show up every week with that big system. Build the trend. Right. And on top of that, tell me what you think.

Kara Brown (43:19.01)
Yes. Yes.

Future Of Selling (43:25.454)
What do we need to do? Because you're the expert in the room, right? Tell me what we need to do. All right, sorry, I didn't mean to get on that.

Kara Brown (43:31.278)
Even if you don't know what to do, like even if you are like young in your career and this is your first job or you don't really know what's next. If you have this base of ICP and measurement, they'll tell you like the leadership team has done this before. They've seen it done well before, or you can say, Hey, I don't really know what's next, but I'm going to go ask a smart marketer, but I'm still going to start with ICP volume velocity value.

And if you start there, they can call you, they can call me, they can call my friends, they can call someone that they respect in the face and get ideas for what's next. But that baseline is so important.

Future Of Selling (44:12.878)
Got it, got it. Okay, cool. So I got a couple of takeaways in from you. So one, lock down your ideal customer profile, right? And then I really like the, it's almost like the pre-mortem approach. Agree to what it's not. It's easy to agree to what it is, but agree to, know, get the team in the room and agree to what it's not. That'll help refine it. And then secondly, it comes back to measurement. So volume, value, and velocity. Those are the things. Okay, got it, got it.

Kara Brown (44:40.59)
There you go.

Future Of Selling (44:42.958)
Cool. Well, I appreciate it so much. Thanks for your time. If anybody's interested, they can find you on LinkedIn easily. I found you there easily. So good for that. Look at the revenue engine book is out there. And I think you're going to be like I was looking at your schedule of seminars. I think you're going be in Dallas unless it was an old post. You're going be in Dallas on May 30th.

Kara Brown (44:50.862)
No!

Kara Brown (45:05.326)
It's brand new. are on the road. We are on the road this year. The ReliquiEngine book is available and then the workbook will be available very shortly. But it's done. It's 80 pages. It takes you through exercises of ICT and measurement, how are we doing and trade show math and all kinds of cool stuff. So we're taking it on the road. There are two hour workshops and then we can have those larger conversations about volume, velocity and value.

Future Of Selling (45:18.983)
Yeah.

Future Of Selling (45:29.646)
Okay, so really if somebody's interested, they should go find where your workshops are too. See if you're close and then enroll, get there, learn.

Kara Brown (45:35.126)
Yeah, sure. yeah.

Kara Brown (45:40.415)
We tried to hit the whole country throughout the year, so we're around.

Future Of Selling (45:42.958)
Yeah, cool, cool. Okay. Well, thank you so much for your time today. Appreciate the conversation and have a good rest of the day. Great weekend and look forward to kind of following you and see where this goes. All right. Thank you. Bye bye.

Kara Brown (45:54.51)
Thanks so much.