He Wrote The Sales Bible of Silicon Valley - Aaron Ross - Episode 100!

# Bridge the Gap Podcast Transcript

Welcome back to another episode of the Bridge the Gap podcast powered by Revenue Reimagine. Today's guest is someone who quite literally wrote the book on modern outbound. Aaron Ross is the author of Predictable Revenue, a playbook that's influenced just about probably every SaaS sales org over the last decade. He helped Salesforce design and implement the Cold Calling 2.0 model that added over a hundred million in recurring revenue, and since then has advised hundreds of companies on building scalable sales systems.

But today we're not just going to talk about looking backward. We're not going to focus on Predictable Revenue. We're going to talk about what's changed, what parts of the playbook still work, what needs to be rethought, and most importantly, Aaron, where GTM strategy is headed next. Thanks for joining the show, man.

Sounds good. You guys are going to start off the laundry list like, how many people today have said, "Oh, Predictable Revenue is dead"? Man, it's so funny because people are trying to figure that out. It's just so much data, right? There's so much data out there. It's like, what do you put your predictability on?

Yeah. Or the SDR is dead, or you know, this is dead. I mean, it's good, makes for good marketing. Some people actually believe what they're saying. And I think once you're older, you're like, nothing actually ever dies. Direct mail repurposed. Direct mail is still alive and kicking. You know, steak dinners. We have clients that get some of their biggest deals from direct mail. So it's just more channels, more stuff. It's just different direct mail. You can't send the same crappy postcard that everyone sends. You got to stand out.

It makes for better controversy though if you say that something people are familiar with is dead. So yeah, absolutely.

Well, it's funny. My interior designer, she says all the time, "We did that fifteen years ago and now it's coming all back." Like everything is cyclical.

Yeah. Bell bottoms in the seventies and then nineties. Probably five pack time for bell bottoms to come back.

Exactly.

Aaron, so you wrote the book that launched thousands of outbound teams. What do you think people still get right when they follow it, and what happens when they miss the mark? Like you wrote the book and people followed it and they did really well, and then they missed the mark. Like what goes well and what doesn't go well in that process?

Yeah. Well, the thing is, I think when people read, so the original book is Predictable Revenue, then there was a sequel called From Impossible to Inevitable. When people read, especially the Predictable Revenue book, and you know, the world changes, and so there's a lot of these people who say, right, so the book was basically the key ideas were you need to have predictable lead generation in order to create predictable growth. And a lot of people hear that like, "Yeah, duh," but actually, there's a time it wasn't that long ago when most SaaS companies or B2B companies wanted to grow revenue by adding sales people.

So separating the closing and the selling, so specializing your teams. You know, predictable pipelines and lead generation, seeds, nets, and different kinds of leads. So there's these core principles we can go through some of those.

And what people would do is all right, we're going to build an outbound team and we're going to send email, make calls, and have STRs. And you know, any kind of channel was a victim of its own success, right? Blogging, email, SEO. It's all the same. So of course, as every channel gets more flooded, and this is also for future channels because this is not just something that only happened in the past. Any channel—LinkedIn, they all get flooded. And so of course, it's not something today. Whether it's email or calling or LinkedIn, you can't just pick your channel and spray and pray. You actually could do that and get great results ten years ago. Sure. But now, you need to just be better, more targeted, more insightful. Like nothing new. More targeted, more insightful, more empathetic, which means you understand them more closely. You knowing where they are, what they look like, what they're interested in, what they've experienced, and that could have changed in the last three months or six months.

And so the last bit I'd put on is that, again, the AI thing is like, yeah, AI is going to change all kinds of stuff. And there's some changes we don't know about. What it hasn't done yet is create new kinds of work we don't even know about yet. That'll happen. We don't know, right?

And so yeah, of course people say the SDR is dead and the BDR is dead and the XDR is dead. But first of all, no, it's not. But the thing is, people confuse the tactics with the book. There's these core principles that were there. So specialization of your team is a core principle, right? You need more types of people, more types of jobs. You can do fewer things better, whether they're human or whether they're agentic. So the SDR and also, not every company should do outbound. Not every company should do blogging or content. So you have to know your business.

Can we pause one second? What you just said is so true. Not every company should do outbound. Aaron, you don't know how many people we speak to that the very first thing they say to us is, "We need to build outbound," and we need to do it because we need to send out forty thousand messages.

Oh my god.

Exactly. Take a step back. Well, okay, think about this. They've got the pressure cooker of let's say they have investors. Some don't, okay. Either there's investors or maybe they're not. They're the CEO. If they're not the CEO, they've got social pressure, right? Compare and despair. Like there's all that we're living in a society of, it's like, swimming in basically fake pressure. It's not even real, right? It's just all societal. Like you don't have to grow at 100% a year to get the funding, to get the thing. You don't have to. It's this weird rat race. It's a new rat race. It's not the corporate rat race. It's the societal rat race or the SaaS rat race or the AI rat race. Pick your rat race. It's the segment of hyperrowth. Hyperrowth. Like, show me one place where hyperrowth has ever worked. Like you scale quickly if you're a unicorn, but by luck most of the time. It's not like you plan to hyperrowth.

Yeah. And you know what? The thing is, like if you do it and want to do it, great, amazing. If you want to raise money, great. If you don't want to raise money, great. I think it gets caught up in people. It's like in the whole, or the ego. It's the validation, the ego, and also like that addiction of success. Like money can be addictive in its way. And you know, ego and having to raise from a certain amount from a certain VC in a certain valuation or hit a certain growth rate. If you're not doing that, you feel like a failure, because especially, it used to be mostly men, and now I think it's evening out. Because if you don't hit that, and like these external factors of signals of success, then you know, because we're not taught to grow up with some sort of inner self-confidence that is mostly disconnected from external validation. Like come on, of course we all. And so again, it's like, "Ah, I'm failing as a person if I don't have it." So there's this big tangled web around why people come in like, "Oh, I need to do let's say outbound," right? Because it could. I need to lose weight, gain weight. I need to get married or not get married or get whatever. I need to do outbound. I send all these messages because there's this pressure. And you know, again, I'd be happy to tell people, and I don't even do outbound consulting anymore. Is like just don't do outbound, right? And see if they fight you on it. If they really need to do it, they'll probably figure it out. And then if they do need to do it, you know, when I was doing it for a long time, a lot of the things, look, it's going to take you six to eighteen months to see real revenue from it. Like basically, it's going to take longer than you want. You got, you know, you need to make sure you have the right people doing the right things and the right expectations. And yeah, of course you get all the stories. People are always going to publish case studies that are the ninety-nine percent success cases, right? That's the news, right? You get the unicorn and the Instagram case studies. You get the AI rants from zero to six million ARR in nine months because those are exciting, but that's not what most people are doing.

So again, it's this distorted reality that we all live in. You know, if you can kind of see that, it's like, how are you the tail or are you the dog, if I get that right? You know, is it wagging you or are you wagging it? And so yeah, it's all this weird pressure. And I think what it does is I'm seeing even more now, whether it's outbound or not, it could be, you know, if I do work on boards, it's usually around go to market and growth. But there's a lot of companies that they ping pong around. Let's try this, let's try that. Or even within.

# Outbound Sales and Predictable Revenue in 2025

Outbound, let's try these, let's try that, and let's try this kind of SEO, and you know, because it's not working fast enough, and so they switch. And I don't know, before it works.

Yeah, well, that's the problem, Aaron. Let me ask you: so if you were to sit down today and write kind of the 2025 version of Predictable Revenue, what's the one thing off the top of your head that is in the first book that wouldn't make the cut today?

Um, okay, that's a good question. So, well, I would say for the Predictable Revenue book, there was something that was not in that book that made it into the second book, the From Impossible book, which was the very first chapter: nailing a niche. That's online. Okay.

So today, I'm not planning on writing a book. Although I'm talking to people about helping them think through it and write one. To me, where I go to is the key principles that still apply. People struggle with specializing your sales team, whether they're human or not. More jobs so people can do fewer things better. It's nailing a niche. You have to be even more insightful, more specific, and more targeted. These are not going to change. AI will change lots of things, not going to change these principles.

So re-nailing your niche, in other ways, you know, it's like rethinking how you're creating pipeline, because the channels are always changing and the metrics are changing. What worked six months ago may not work today. So it's kind of more adaptive to it as well.

Another is culture. To me, the newer stuff—I touched on this in prior books—but really I would expand on creating a culture, a growth culture, which is combining some level of challenge, which most people have, but with caring. I think what's missing in general, needed more than ever in both a hybrid remote world and an AI-busy world, is ways that you can connect with your team. Because how you do that will affect a lot of things: their loyalty, their belief in the company, their belief in the product, and the way they treat customers, as well as your ability to grow them and their ability to contribute. So that would be a bigger section of focus.

And the last one, which is the newest part—I mean, I alluded to this in prior books. Even in Predictable Revenue I had an example around how I worked with my team to help them redo the comp plans, a collaborative approach. But the newest section would be—I give this talk now called "Creating Predictable Revenue in an Unpredictable World." It touches on these things, and looking to the future, no one knows where AI is going to take things. It's exciting, also scary. No one really knows.

But one thing that will serve you well, no matter what happens—the thing that is the most durable—are relationships. Those relationships can look like how you treat your internal people, how your relationships with your team work. It can be the relationships your salespeople create and have with customers. It could be your relationship with your market. That could be doing a one-to-many or one-to-one, right? I've created a lot of relationships that are more one-to-many through books and things.

A lot of companies are focusing on partner ecosystems, communities, and partners. So there's a lot of ways you can take this and apply it to your business. But relationships to me, no matter what happens on the tech side, they're going to help you have more durable success. Relationships combined with some sort of systems equal durable growth. That's like the newest thing for the future.

I love that. Someone just asked me a very similar question on LinkedIn: if outbound is dead—and yes, 100%—but where's the focus? My initial gut is relationships, go to network, social selling, making sure that you're fostering and nurturing those relationships.

Going back to my old sales leader days, a lot of people like to say, "Oh, I have a relationship." Well, what is a relationship? A relationship has to be bidirectional, right? A relationship isn't that I have Aaron's cell phone number and I could text him and he gives me a thumbs up. A relationship is where we can actually have a conversation and ask each other to help one another.

Well, it doesn't have to be bidirectional, but it can be. Tell me more.

Well, I mean, there's lots of people I reach out to that I don't really know, but they know me, and they will refer me on. Here's a good example. I have a friend. I met him through another sales guy. He's a sales guy, an entrepreneur with a sales business in Germany. I'm in Europe. I moved to Edinburgh from Los Angeles six years ago. Just a great guy. We have a good time, good friends, and we've kind of wanted to do something together, some kind of business together. I've known him for like two or three years. Finally we're like, okay, let's do an event in Munich. We'll do it in like six weeks and invite some sales leaders and so on.

I'm messaging people on LinkedIn about this event, and I'm getting a lot of responses. A lot of people say, "Hey, I like your book," or "I saw this," and they know me better than I know them. It's starting a two-way relationship but starting off as one-way. So the good point is that it's that one-to-many you were talking about.

It's interesting because that's what's kind of happening at a macro level. People are trying to do one-to-many. Podcasts do it, yeah. I mean, LinkedIn is a great example. You have hundreds of thousands of followers. How many people do you really know, right? But you put something out there like, "Hey, I'm going to be in Germany doing this event," and they're like, "Yeah, I'd be interested in seeing what you're going on with."

And I think you know, speaking of founder—so again, we can create one-to-many relationships through content, through events, through brand, through these things. It's fine.

For me, I watch some of these guys. Adam Robinson, for example, he's obviously done really well. He's one of the "Predictable Revenue is dead" guys. There are some others. But I know that you've got to decide what the other thing is that I would include too. You've really got to figure out how to stick to your core. I don't know if that's the right term, but in a really busy world, as a person—whether you're an entrepreneur or a salesperson—it's like, how can you continue to figure out what you're the best at or really good at or want to be really good at, and kind of try to offload the things you're not great at?

For example, I'm not great at consistent content, right? The content treadmill that the LinkedIn founder content guys do—I just can't. That's not my book content. That's where I'm a book person. When I do content, it's usually towards books. If I'm meeting people, I'm thinking, you know, because I like meeting people, but if there's more of a business context, maybe they'd be interested in a book or refer the book. That's my lens.

I'm 53 now, and even in this last five years, I've really seen that. So again, it's this other part of the book. It's a different version of specialization. It's more like each person in such a busy world where it's so confusing and there are so many demands on you from so many people—friends, family, teammates, customers, etc.—how can you continue to figure out what you can and should be really great at and try to offload as much of the other stuff as you can?

People buy from people. That's why companies who invest in meaningful connections win. The best part? Gifting doesn't have to be expensive to drive results. Just thoughtful. Sendoso's intelligent gifting platform is designed to boost personalized engagement throughout the entire sales process. Trust me, I led sales for a Sendoso competitor, and I could tell you no one does gifting better than Sendoso. If you're looking for a proven way to win and retain more customers, visit sendoso.com.

Yeah, definitely. So let's take a little bit of a shift. You've worked with tons of leadership teams, gone through a bunch of work. What's the biggest thing that you're seeing today that's not working? What's in the go-to-market strategy, and where do they go look first? Like, something's not working. It's a common pattern.

Where do they go first to get that fixed?

Yeah, it's a good question. You know, I'm trying, you know, I'm on a couple boards and I've been on, you know, I'm just thinking there's. I think first of all there's so many different types of companies and challenges. But I do think that one of a common theme is that there's so many things that can work and things that you should be doing that people just get too scattered doing too many things. It's kind of like, well marketing. Is it a priority thing? Is it a priority thing or is it like not putting the work in type of thing?

No, I think it's just trying to juggle too many balls because there's something you feel like you need to be doing and you feel like if I... it's a fear. I think usually the fear of missing out, whether it's driven by the again investors to CEO, CEO to VP, whatever it could be sales, could be marketing, could be product features. Um, it's just really hard for people to kind of zone in on like, "What are these really, these few things we really need to do that are the most important?" And remember, okay, they're going to take longer than we think they will to get really right, right? Because as humans, we all think, "Oh, it'll take two weeks or two months or two years." In reality, it's three times that. So, you know, it's like really stick to that. I wish more people knew that. I wish more people knew like, just because you are a sales leader or you've done it in the past or you've done it somewhere else, like it's just different. Like, you have to go through the process. You have to evolve and figure out where the challenge is before you can fix it. And then you got to give it time to get fixed.

Yeah. And I think something that's really been lost in the shuffle and I haven't gotten anyone to really zone in on this honestly. So I don't know why or, you know, so going back to this talk I gave about relationships and I have these examples. I'm still kind of, but there's one example that is I don't have a term for it but it's kind of like customer referral playbook. Um, so here's, maybe people are so overwhelmed and so busy they can't get. I think this is a great idea and I don't know, maybe it just can't fit because it doesn't fit their current playbook. But I'm like, okay, and I've had a conversation with a CEO. I'm like, "The number one thing you need to do is talk to customers and then ask them for referrals to other customers." And there's ways to help with that, right? There's all kinds of tools to surface, you know, "I'm going to talk to Bob and here's three people kind of like Bob. I'm going to talk to." Um, and he, you know, I think he's overwhelmed, right? He just can't get it in his mind that that's like an incredibly valuable. And then meanwhile, he's trying to do like SEO and even outbound. Like don't do this stuff. Like it's just not resonating. Referrals are like, that's number one. Like if you have a referral in a conversation that's interesting, that they wouldn't take that handshake.

Yeah. Well, it's work and I think so there's a couple things. One, I think it's when people are really stressed, their processing power goes down and they can kind of only do what they've done before. It's like, think about all the sales people or executives. You're like, "Ah, I'm not getting enough deals. I just need to make more calls. My calls aren't working. I need to make more calls." Or, "My emails aren't working. I need to send more email." So there's something about humans. Like because it happens often enough, it's almost like not their fault because it's just like the way we revert in a fight or flight towards doing more of the same thing. Um, and it's like if it's a new process, the same result. You know, and it's, I mean, same in same in relationships, same in business. It's like we're there's a human thing there. And like to do a new habit, a new process, a new thing is just probably too like there's this big chunk of brain power. And if your brain can fit this much in, it just, I don't know, like it slides off or something.

But the gist of it is I understand why um referrals are not like very systematized and especially like B2B companies. Part of that is kind of me like promoting specialization because you have, you know, prospect. You know, there's SDR types and there's sales people and then there's customer success or account managers. And so now you've got this um misalignment of incentive. I feel like a corporate person now, but the people who want, who need more meetings don't have the relationships with the customers who have the, you know, referrals. And so in my mind if you said, "Look, we're going to make this a priority." And so once either people are basically signing or three to six months later once they've got some great results and they're happy, um, have a conversation with them, you know. So there has to be some kind of teamwork aspect where, you know, revenue accountability people talk with the customer success, the relationship owners and say, "Look, let's jointly go to this customer. Say hey, would you be okay? You've had some success. You know, if there's some other people that we think could benefit as well, could we ask you to make some intros? Make it easy on you, right?" And it should be a live conversation, not some automated email, because people don't. And they say hopefully yes and then later they go back and, you know, again, you can surface, "Hey, here's two prospects this person might know. You know, would you mind making these intros?" So it's more of like a you do need some teamwork and there's some new kind of metrics and there's new, there's a new playbook of some sort. It's not like that big a deal but it is a different playbook with different stuff. So I think it's just hasn't clicked for people yet and I don't have the right term for people to be like, "Oh, why aren't we doing this? Why are we doing this, investing all this money on these other channels which might be working or may, and we're just ignoring potentially the best one and the one positioned for the future?"

So that's my little soapbox.

No, I think this has been something that has been talked about for five years, ten years. Like when you first sign the contract, potentially you have the honeymoon period. Like there could be references or referrals there, and then like you're saying, like three months in, you get like some success. Like once you get the first success, like then you may want to have that second conversation. I think in many cases the CS team who is now transitioning over the last twelve months into more of a revenue-generating organization is starting to run that play. Um, it needs to be probably built a bit more succinct. Like maybe you run some AI to scrape their LinkedIn to find people that are in your ICP and say, "Hey, can you make me an introduction?" Like if you don't know anybody, here are a couple people that I think would make good introductions and they may know them or they may not know them.

Yeah. And there's, you know, I have a buddy creating something called Connect the Dots to help with that. And there's other companies who've tried this over the years and there's one other aspect to this which is, um, you know, it's not just a onetime thing. You need to be able to recharge the battery because if you ask for too many referrals, you know, maybe it's even three in one month, the person, it kind of, it's, they call it battery. It's like it drains the battery. So there's this other aspect, but yeah I don't, I don't think it'd be that big a deal to figure out something that's going to work to help power that.

Um, for me it's one of these things where I might just need to have a couple case studies and examples where people go, "Oh, okay, wow, someone else did it," and it kind of makes it easy for me to understand how it would work and what to do and now I can fit it into my little, you know, mental model to make it work in my place, my company.

Erin, what's next for GTM? So predictable revenue. Let's get predictive go to market. What's coming down the pipe? You know, we know obviously AI is huge. Um, but where is buyer behavior going to shift? Call it in the next twelve to twenty-four months. And like with AI, where are people going to miss out? Where's it being used wrong?

I don't know. Well, and the first thing, AI is only as a label is only going to be around for, I mean, not necessarily that long, because it's going to be a utility like, uh, you know, internet, electricity, and gas. Yeah. It's gone to the internet. When the internet first came out, "Oh, it's an internet company." And then after a few years, it's like, "Well, it's just a company that uses it." So I don't know, you know, again, I think time and again there's uh the obvious accelerations, you know, improvements, accelerations of things we're already doing. Um, and but there's all kinds of things that'll be created that we don't really know yet. So like once you have agent to agent, you know, buying and selling or researching or I, nobody really knows. And plus no one really knows, you know, it is true that the speed of the change that could happen in terms and also including the job market could.

# Transcript

Be ugly. Could I? I don't know, more likely to be ugly than smooth because again, it's probably going to happen. So it could happen. So past anyone who could talk about, I read an article the other day. The CEO of Anthropic was saying 50% of white collar jobs, he believes, could be taken over by AI, leading to like a 10 to 20% unemployment. I mean, maybe, you know, he also—remember, he's got some sort of agenda in this too. It's not like he's, you know, whatever.

And yeah, lots of people will adapt. A lot of people won't adapt. And I think too that there's always like the tech people and the people who already kind of have, whether they made it or inherited it or got it some other place, like, "Oh, you know, there's going to have to be retraining and you know people just have to figure something out." Like, yeah, that's a lot. Like real people—do you have any children, parents, sisters, brothers in that boat? You might take it a bit more seriously because no one's really giving support right now, it seems like, because the shoe hasn't really dropped.

And how that affects—but even more so, you know, the effect it's going to have on, you know, like the uncertainty already on society—because everyone talked about it started after COVID, right? So then after COVID, then there was the cost of living crisis, and then I don't know, elections and AI. Everyone just has this sense, including executives. Right, this one VP of sales told me like he's just a little bit terrified of how fast things are changing. And you know that sense of what—no one knows what's going to happen next month. Like the floor could drop out, which, you know, maybe it will, maybe it won't. But that anxiety creates this reversion. It's harder for people to make better decisions, longer-term decisions, the right decisions. They revert back to prior behavior. "Give me the quick win. I just need like the 40—you said the 40,000 things right now for outbound. Like I need the quick win because this, that, the other." And it's like this, you know, this like almost regression towards, "I'm just like turning the crank." And if the crank isn't working, I got to turn it harder.

So I don't know how long it'll take society to kind of adapt between—I don't know—because like you got AI and you got robotics. Like, blue collar—who knows how much blue collar, you know, how many people drive for Uber. With way—I mean, there's a lot of people aren't talking about that nearly enough. There's who knows, you know.

So I'm going back to relationships. And who knows what all that stuff is going to do. But if you're focusing on creating and building good relationships, whether you're going to be looking for jobs, looking for funding, looking for customers, fill in the blank—just having a base level of mental health, community health, creativity, people to talk to, like that's going to serve you.

I just—that's what I'm doing. Like trying to, how do I do things that are interesting to me that are, you know, feel creative with the right people? And I still have to make money. I got 10 children. I got a big family. And I didn't start at Salesforce early enough to retire a long time ago.

So even then, it's rather than going back to, "Hey, how did they make money in the before?" It's, you know, "What feels right, you know, really to me?" It's like more of an intuition because I don't feel like the things I do, I could go back and use, you know, a regression analysis and AI to predict from what worked in the past what's going to work for me in the future. But I can focus on what feels right, what's interesting, where are the gaps, and who can I do it with? And you know, if I keep doing that, then it's going to keep working out.

So what's next for you?

Good question. So I'm going through—I've got like, I went through my own midlife crisis the last few years, right? So I had a business doing outbound in North America that I was just sick of doing the work. And part of that was the work itself. Part of it was it wasn't a good partnership in business. Business partnership for the long term. So had a divorce out of that business. Divorce.

And so I've got this, you know, first it was like, "Well, I want to make money doing what I love, but I have no idea what that is." So like, for, what do I actually like to do? If I could do something, what would that be? For like two years, like, I have no idea.

And then over time, what I got more clarity on is, "Oh, okay, what I actually really am drawn to and like to do are books." So that's writing. Writing with other people, helping other people. So, you know, advising and crafting, writing new books. And the new books are a bit different. So one's called "Income Operating System." The title's got to change. Just how people can make more money. The other book is called "Eat and Grow"—like, kind of crazy family stories from having and supporting a family of 10.

So new books and working with some others again, talking to people about a new sales book. We'll see.

So books, speaking, and partnerships. You know, it works great for me when I have a really good partner, someone I trust. Like, I've got a little business with a great partner in Brazil. It's amazing, right? It's kind of predictable revenue in Brazil. They're growing like crazy. Our North America business was like declining. The Brazil one's growing like doing great. A lot based on things like culture, treating people well. It's not like the tactics. It's a lot of the soft skills, which lead to the right decisions for the big picture and right decisions for the tactical stuff.

So I'm, you know, whether you call it a goal, I'm on this path of making—I'm not making as much money now doing what I love as I did when I was doing really kind of full-time outbound stuff. But I'm on track. And my plan is to make more money doing what I love. And again, I feel like I'm not totally locked into exactly what it is. It keeps getting more clear. And then on making more money doing things I love to do, things I like to do, or even like to do, than I did doing the consulting.

But I love that speaking part. Like this one, yeah, like this thing in Germany that's looking promising. I want to do some stuff with this guy. Love it.

And you know, I've struggled, like a lot of people, having friendships over the long term. And you realize, um, you know, I do like having—if I have a business or project with someone who I like as a friend, then it makes it easier to like maintain that versus being something else to do on top of all the kids and the things and the other.

So Dale, we need to be friends. We need to have a business together, guys. It's there. The relationship is very interesting. I think the pendulum will swing way back. Like, I think the pendulum, like scale, breaks everything. If we look at marketing automation, we look at cold outbound, we look at outreach and sales law, like scale breaks everything. And so we need to come back to the other side of the pendulum.

Let's wrap this up a little bit. You're off for a little bit of rapid fire. See what you like, what you don't like.

Yeah.

What if I said no?

Okay. Well, I am good.

Good thing. What's the first app you check when you wake up in the morning?

Usually text, because if I have kids in the states, if there's some emergency or something, which there rarely is, but yeah, texts.

Early bird or night owl?

I don't know, you know. I haven't had a choice in either one or the other for so long. Like, I have to get up early to get the kids to school and stay up late because, you know, people in other time zones, like kids and the wives and things. Well, I like to talk late.

What's your favorite indulgent snack or food?

Coffee.

Good. Snobby coffee?

Snobby coffee. What's your favorite? Just like, tell me. No, I like, you know, I like lattes or hot chocolate. So I live in Edinburgh. Best place is called Modern Standard, which is nearby. And yeah, so like, or hot chocolate where they don't use the powder. They actually melt chocolate, you know, it's usually like real hot chocolate. Yeah, $25, you know.

So living in Edinburgh, Edinburgh is one of my favorite cities. I coincidentally had the best Thai food of my life in some back alley in Edinburgh, probably 15 years ago.

But of all the places you've been, or maybe you haven't, what's your dream vacation destination?

For me, I, you know, I actually don't know. I couldn't tell you because my brain can't get out of the mode of, if I'm going places, it's for work or with kids or, you know, some other thing. So I've traveled a lot. So I don't know. I don't think it'd be a destination. Oh, okay, probably go back to—I had a—yeah, there's like, I really love being there with some family, like 10 years ago. And there's, I've been a couple times, but that last time there's something that was really like special about it.

I love that.

Awesome. Let's wrap it up. If you were to fix go-to-market today, what's one thing that you would tell people today? Like, "Go do this." I think I know.

What the answer is, but let's wrap it with that. Yeah, I think that'd be figure out how to create better relationships with your customers and ask them for more referrals. Love that. I knew that was going to be the answer. If it wasn't that, I think it'd be, you know, everyone figure out how to make exercise and sleep more of a priority. I love it.

Erin, thank you so much for joining the show. Thank you for all the knowledge you have given to the sales community. It was a pleasure to chat with you, man.

Hey, guys, I feel like I'm just getting started too. I love it. That's the best part. We can go another hour.