Revenue Reimagined Podcast: Episode #1 Unlocking Sales Potential: The Key to Business Growth

[Music]

Thank you. Welcome to episode one of the Revenue Reimagine podcast. We want to kick the show off with a bang, and what better way to do that than to bring a little LinkedIn feud to real life? Dale and I are super excited to have both Jen Allen-Knuth and Kyle AC on the show today.

Jen is the head of community growth at Lavender AI, former Chief Evangelist at Challenger, and host of the Winning the Challenger Sale podcast. She spent the last 18 years in a variety of frontline sales roles selling to CEOs, Chief Sales Officers, and Chief Marketing Officers for small companies like Challenger, Corporate Executive Board, and Gartner. So I think she knows a thing or two about sales.

Kyle started as an SDR at Qualtrics, was rapidly promoted to a VP role, and after five consecutive Presidents Clubs as an AE, Director, and VP, he made the move over to MongoDB, where he leads North America for High-Tech Acquisition and is also the founder of Sales Introvert Alerts.

Welcome both of you to the show. Thanks for being here.

Adam: Dale, it's so great to be with you too. Episode one, I mean, it's great to be with me. Let's be real, but it's all good.

Kyle: No, I will never. Great, great to see you, Adam. Great to see you, Dale. Jen, here, it's, I also am seeing you right now. I'll say that.

Adam: So it's a little behind the scenes for everyone. It's funny because both of you messaged me and said you might be about five minutes late, and I texted Dale and I said we're gonna see who shows up first because the other one's gonna give the person some grief right now. I fully expected Jen to show up first, but she didn't. Kyle was here first, and we were like just sitting here twiddling our thumbs waiting.

Jen: You know why? It's because I actually work, and Kyle just writes posts on the internet about doing work. So it's a little bit of a different circumstance.

Kyle: No, Jen. I write posts about delegation.

Jen: Ah, let's be clear. That's very, very good.

Adam: So now that we're starting with a little bit of controversy, I mean the show is called Revenue Reimagine, so for each of you, if you were in a particular role in the go-to-market function, the revenue function today, what is the other function in the entire go-to-market function that you would want to take on?

Adam: Kyle, ladies first in 45 minutes. If I could be in any revenue-producing role besides sales, I would want to be in RevOps.

Kyle: Ooh, I would love to. Would love to go set really unrealistic quotas, tell myself just why they are realistic, make panic a little bit, roll out calm plans at my convenience. No, in all seriousness, I think RevOps has never been more critical. Territory management, getting that right, getting the org set up correctly, I think has an outsized impact. Now, I've read it before, so if I were to leave sales leadership or revenue ops, obviously the place for me. Love it.

Jen: So I'm currently in marketing, which is the first time I've ever been in marketing in this community role. I would—mine's an easy answer. I would go back to sales. I still miss it. There's a lot of things I don't miss about it, but there are certain things I do miss, which is why I get pulled into it. But that's why you're a rock star marketer, because you know what I'm saying.

Adam: That's true. I just constantly think of what did marketing always used to do that bothered me, and just don't do those things. So it's funny you say that, right? So I figured you might go back to sales. Kyle, I didn't expect RevOps, and we'll dive into that in a minute, and certainly the part about unrealistic quotas.

Adam: But revenue is broken, right? Like, I think it's safe to say that revenue that we've seen over the past, call it five, seven, ten years, this growth-at-all-costs mentality, just throw people at it—it's not working. So how do we fix it? And you both have two different lenses. Jen, you have sales and community marketing. Kyle, you look at it through a different lens—you know, having come from Qualtrics and now at MongoDB. Like, what is the number one thing? You're in charge. What are you gonna do to fix what's broken right now?

Adam: Do you want to take it first, and you can't fix each other?

Jen: Yeah, Jen, I'll let you go first this time, okay? This one is an easy one for me. I think, and I talk about this a lot, but I think the traditional way of throwing volume and activity at a problem, a revenue problem, is largely why we are where we are. And it's not to say that volume and activity are never effective. They were highly effective when demand is really high.

What I would do instead is I would take every single member of a sales organization. I don't care if you've been there for 10 years, 15 years, 5 minutes, two days, and I would re-ground people in the principles of what it is that we are solving for, how those problems anchor up into higher-order things, and what else we are competing against outside of just what we sell.

I think the biggest problem that I observe today that lights me up in a really bad way is we are so myopically focused on the thing that we sell and how great that thing is, and we're asking sellers to go and have really difficult conversations where they have little to no context around anything outside of what they are selling. So for me, I think you can bucket it under business acumen. I think we have a big, oozing, gaping wound of business acumen today, and that's why we default back to volume and activity.

Kyle: Good one. I like that. Well, Jen, that was brilliant. So I'm shocked.

Adam: I mean, it's Kyle, it's almost the exact notes that you were typing in the chat, telling her to say. I mean, has one for a long time is alignment between seller, customer, and company. That's how it works for him. So if you think about the traditional SaaS model, seller gets a contract signed. The only person getting value at that point is the salesperson. They get paid up front. They get paid their commission. The customer does not get value yet. The customer realizes value typically months later as they implement the solution, and if it works the way it's supposed to, which isn't even guaranteed. And then the company, the seller works for, doesn't get value oftentimes until the renewal happens because most companies are spending so much to acquire the customer, they're losing money up until the renewal and the payback period actually comes to a close.

And so you have these really bad incentives across the board, right? And so if I want to go realign—and I'm shooting a little bit because it's a lot about what MongoDB is doing in that consumption world—is try to make sure that everybody gets value as close to the same way and at the same time as possible to make sure incentives are clear across the board.

I'm seeing this improve the sales cycle because you're thinking about customer success, not contract signed. I'm seeing it work up for profitability because the company is getting value before they pay out commissions, and everything comes together to align all stakeholders in the sales process much better than the traditional try to sell as much as possible up front.

The customer ends up getting screwed. They may not get value. They churn. Rep might make money or they're not including deals at all because the customers don't trust them, but it breaks landing across the board. So that's what that would look at.

Adam: That's super interesting because I think the other part is like the metrics that go across each function in revenue may be conflicting, right? And I think that's what you're saying. Like, if we get alignment on the metrics, and I think what happened with this whole, like, kind of mini crash or crash that we had, is it enables NDR or NRR, however we're going to describe it, versus ARR? So like the focus is shifting to profitability and like, Kyle, super impressed that I have—I don't hear many sales leaders actually think about CAC or think about profitability. They're actually thinking about ARR closed deals and numbers at the top of funnel versus all the way through. So super awesome. I love that answer.

Kyle: I mean, I'll say just really quickly, like, as an AE someone who's on the front line for as long as I was, I caught myself emphatically agreeing with Kyle by nodding my head. I had to stop it.

Jen: Wow. But as someone who was an AE for so long, first time ever.

Kyle: Yeah, exactly. Well, Jen was typing in the notes what Kyle to say, right? But I never thought about profitability for like my first 10 years because I never had to. All I was measured against was an annual target, right? So if I had to discount it down, like, no sweat off my back, right?

I was lucky enough to work for a sales leader who then spent a lot of time with our team saying you might think this is a win. It's actually a loss for the business. But I think that problem that Kyle mentioned is so, so bad because if you've got people out in the front line doing things not recognizing the harm they caused to the business, of course we're going to be in the situation that we're in.

Jen: I remember fighting with sales leaders about this. So I started my career in healthcare, right, where COGS—cost of goods sold—is something we talk about all the time. This device costs us whatever, 900 bucks. We need to sell it for X. And I remember my manager, you know, Kyle would tell me, "Well, it doesn't matter. Sell it for 700. Like, we just need the..."

Closed deal period, the end. We need to put that number up. And then I made great money, and I think that is what created a lot of the problem we have now. But I want to push back on you for a second. So I agree with you this needs to change, but today's generation of sellers is, and I'd love if you could speak to how you're addressing this at your company, today's generation of sellers is so used to "I closed the deal, I get paid." Arguably, I better get paid that same month or next month. Because if you tell me I have to wait till the next quarter, I'm going to go find another job elsewhere. How do we change that mindset to get the sellers bought in to what healthy business should look like?

Yeah, it's a really fair point. One of the challenges has been finding the right compensation plans and looking at different milestones that you pay out. And so we have a very blended call plan. I'm not going to go into extreme detail just so management doesn't like fire me. But you have to look at different gates that happen earlier in the hierarchy. So that is a to gates to recognize before they're at full spend is big. So you're actually, in some ways, paying a higher commission rate than traditional because you're paying on the consumption piece.

I think though it's also a mentality shift. Because two years ago, even a year ago, reps were taking outrageous OTEs, getting massive pay raises, and then they all got laid off, right? And so I think a lot of smart sellers are now saying, you know what, maybe it's not all about the OTE. Maybe I really should look deeper at product-market fit and sustainable growth. When I'm on recruiting calls, I'm talking about the sustainability of our company and where we're going long term. I'm not saying, like, if you're looking for the best place to go make as much as you can in the next couple of years, maybe, maybe not. I don't know. It's hard. It doesn't exist like that anymore. It doesn't. Right now, I don't think. I think that's a lottery ticket.

So that's the trade-off, Adam. There is a point where it is a compromise for the seller. However, I'm really bought into: you should be selling for a company where you believe in the long term, and you should buy into a compensation plan that is good for you, and the customer, and the company. Because if it's completely one-sided to the seller, guess who gets chopped when things get hard?

Yeah, yeah. But then companies need to be more aligned, like be more aligned to the selling as well. Because if they know it's a long-term strategy, you can't just be like, okay, you don't hit your number in two quarters, you're gone, right? So we have a systemic problem at the leadership level to make sure that we're putting proper targets. You said something about being in rev-ops and setting bad targets or setting unrealistic targets. That comes from the top down. So if you actually set it up so they understand long term, then maybe you get more activity at that long term, or you get the behavior that you want at the long term. But the behavior and the activity are it.

And Jen, to go back to what you were saying, you know, it was this mindset of, let's just hire people, we're going to pay them a ton of money, right? Kyle, we're going to give them this OTE and they're going to make all this money and it's going to be great. And we could go down a whole tangent about product-market fit and how much you should believe in what you're selling and not just work someplace for the money. But then they would come in, Jen, and they'd be hired and they'd be told, just go reach out to 100 more people, or let's just go hire 20 more people, or go make 25 more phone calls. And all that stuff, that activity model, it's broken. It doesn't work. Talk to me about that a little bit because you got lit up when you were talking about that. How do we change that? How do we create that change?

It's funny. We, the people at the front line, often take the hit for it. We see it all the time on LinkedIn, you hear it all the time: "My sellers suck. My sellers are order takers." Whatever. Because it is so much easier to point the finger at the people who are executing on the strategy versus the person who built the strategy. And so behind every bad email, behind many bad cold calls, unprepared calls, terrible discovery calls, is a leader at the top who believes that sellers are coin-operated activity makers.

And I think we've gotten really far away from looking at sales as a profession. Like, when I think of the word profession, I'm like, it's something to be proud of. It's something that is hard to replicate. And as much as I give Kyle a hard time, Kyle is a true sales professional and also a leader. And so I would imagine the experience of working for Kyle is extremely different than the experience of someone who moved up because they happened to be on the right side of demand for a long time and just said, hey, this play worked for me, let me go make everybody else do it as well. And so, again, as much as I make fun of Kyle, what he's teaching, I think, is very rare. And I think it's why we default to what is easy. And what is easy is to tell people to do a bunch of activities and then to look at a dashboard that has a bunch of green on it and pat ourselves on the back and be like, we're doing the right things. Maybe it's the wrong people.

Um, I remember very early in my career, Jen, being very frustrated at measurements for metrics because I was like, look, yeah, I can go make 80 calls to a sales list and look productive, but get nothing done. And so I decided to write early on, as a sales leader, that I would have very specific outcomes I want to drive, but I'm going to give AEs flexibility of how they get there. I'm going to reason how they best operate and then coach and give input to make sure they're going in the right direction and course correct where needed. But I have never, in my career, ever given any AE a specific volume target.

I worked for a company that shall remain nameless many years ago, and we had a very activity-focused model on calls for our BDR team. And we had not one, not two, but three BDRs that had these like 800 numbers. They would call and they would sit and listen to the recordings just to rank up their call time. They didn't close anything, but boy were they doing great on the metrics, and boy did they get complimented for doing the metrics.

Tying this in, so Kyle, I've followed you in Sales Introverts for a long time. And you talk a lot about buyer psychology. How do we weave this in to getting reps to actually utilize psychology to sell the right way?

So it goes back to alignment. I was talking specifically about the customer being evaluated at a very different time than the salesperson getting value. When a salesperson runs a deal cycle with the contract signature as the endpoint, they behave very differently than if the deal cycle ends when the customer is successfully using your product, right? It's just by changing the marker for when a deal is actually won—from paper signed to successful consumption—it forces better rep behavior. Because if you go sell something, it doesn't work, and they don't have success, then they don't consume, you don't get paid, nothing happens. And then when the buyer understands that your criteria for them is not, again, my success is not contract signed, your success—no, yeah—gets alignment early and often, yeah?

The discovery questions change. The demos change. The business value case building changes. Everything changes to drive something that looks a lot less like a pure sales engagement and a lot more like a sales and CS and customer partnership.

Yeah, one of the things I do with my teams is I call them joint engagement plans because that's what we ended up calling them at the companies. But mutual action plans. But the mutual action plan is kind of like when you're starting to build the proposal out and you're figuring out what the buying cycle is and what the buying process is. But you map it all the way to value, kind of what you're saying. So, like, contract signature is kind of in the middle, and you go all the way to value. Because you have to understand the customers to understand what are the things I'm going to get. What am I going to get value from? Is it two months after the contract signs? Is it a month after? And then you can have the CS team understand the joint engagement plan and you guys can all be on the same page so we can start getting CS involved and driving value for the customer in the sales process near the end of it. So as we're building proposals, as we're going through some of those pieces, if everyone agrees that yes, we're going to sign the contract in August, but we're looking for value in October because we have some board meeting or we have something else that we have to deliver on the customer side, then we can all be aligned in that joint engagement plan.

I love that, Kyle. I think that's super smart. But so many buyers and so many founders and so many sales leaders, like, if you say what's your time to value, they're going to look at you like...

# Transcript

You have six heads. Like, I remember the first time I said that to a founder like in an interview process. Like, so what's our customer's time to value? They, I won't out who they are, look to be there. What's time to value? How are we not talking about this, right? Like, and I think it's interesting and I'm curious both your all's thoughts. This is great. Can this be applied and will this work with early stage startups whose goal is, well, we just gotta get the customer signed to go get funding?

Jen, please.

Yeah, I think so. I work for an early stage startup. It's my first time. I'm not acting like I'm the world's expert on early stage startups, but it is something we are constantly talking about—not in pockets. And I think that's the key. Like, every Friday we have a meeting with engineering, sales, marketing, operations—the entire company—because we are an early stage company and we can do that. And one of the key focus areas that we talk about is how many seconds, how many minutes, how many out—like, what are those intervals at which someone starts to experience that moment of delight or like, man, I'm glad I bought this, or on the other side, like, where are those moments where we're breaking that down?

And I think one of the things that I've seen in other organizations that I've worked with is it's a leadership conversation or it's a customer service conversation or it's a this conversation, and it happens in silos. And so what we failed to do when that happens is we fail to bring all of the voices that might be able to add a unique perspective and look at the problem. But we also failed to make it a significant priority, so it just happens to be on like somebody's KPIs down here, but not a true organizational one.

So I would actually say like your early stage companies are the places where that should be thriving—where we can collectively come together and talk about it because we don't have 700 people on a Zoom. You've got 20 or 30 at best.

But does that—how does—and I want to tie into Lavender, right? So Lavender, I've used it forever. Um, I think it's great. Shameless plug for you all, but it starts when you start selling this way to what Kyle's talking about and what you're talking about. It starts with that initial outreach to the customer, right? It starts with how you're framing what it is you do, what your goal is, what it is you're selling. You are certainly amongst us—Kyle might disagree—but I'll call you the email expert on this podcast. Um, how does it start from the top?

Yeah, I think it starts from being intentional about why we're reaching out now into them. So I mean, that's not a new philosophy. That's been around forever, but it is so frequently disregarded.

And I think it goes back to an earlier problem, which is we're talking about time to value for a customer, but one of the other big like misfires I think we make is time to performance, or whatever we want to call it, for a new SDR, seller. We are so freaking eager to get them to a point where we're like, look, they're performing, that we push them to do things that they're not really prepared to do.

Like, I would argue for most salespeople, particularly new sales people, if your only onboarding for them is throwing them into here's our internal systems, here's who your manager is, here's your attack, and here's what we do, and I'm going to talk to you about it for four days—we cannot be surprised when they pick up the phone and write emails and just talk about what we do. We've taught them to do that. That is literally the playbook we're teaching them.

So I'm a big proponent, and we did this at our last company, of extending the onboarding timeline so that before I ever teach you about the product, I'm teaching you about the executive, the problems they solve, the alternative things they might do, the status quo that they might be okay with, why all of that. So that by the time I put you on the phone—yeah, it might take a little bit longer—but you actually know what the hell you're talking about.

And so then from, to go back to your original question, when I am starting that touchpoint with you, I'm not sending an email that's like, yo, Lavender's a cold email tool and I see you have, you know, SDRs on your team—do you want to try it? I'm actually being able to say I can pick out an observation in what's happening in that company, hypothesize a problem, and show up with a point of view. And to me, that's what great selling is. It's not slinging our stuff and hoping someone gives a damn.

Well, and I think there's a framework. Like, you guys, you know, at Lavender, you guys had the scoring piece of it. But if you take Lavender out for a second and you just talk about how reps are thinking about it, even in presentations, emails, it's like us, us, us, us. And if like, I always set a framework up of like, what about the customer that you know of? Like, anything that you can figure out, even if some of it is guessing? Because then you get them to start conversing with you on like the first slide. Like, you think they have some problem, and then you articulate that to the industry so they don't know—so they know they're not alone. And then you go into how you solve the industry problem, then you can solve their problem.

So if you think about that small little framework of like their problem, industry problem, then how you solve those problems, I think we get away from like my widget is the best widget. But this isn't just tech. That's so I'm working with a client who is non-tech and going through their cold emails. The first email I read was, "Hi, my name is such and such. I'm your account executive at such and such, and we offer you such and such." You can't send this to people. I mean, you can, but the problem's gonna keep going and going and going. And this is where, what would the Lavender score be on that?

Boo. It would be boo. It would be like, not a good score. But this is that we can't fault the seller, right? Because the seller is doing that because the product's what they know.

I just did an email coaching session yesterday, and I had this really thoughtful debate where everyone's like, but I can't explain everything we do in 50 words, so I can't write a 50-word email. And I was like, why do you think you need to explain everything you do in the first email? Like, when you meet someone on an online dating service, are you walking through like your high school GPA and your college major and your activities? Like, that's a weird thing.

So you'd be surprised. So my best friend is in informatics, is in from out of town, and we were going through his Hinge last night. Um, and you'd be amazed what people put up there for like the first thing. It's crazy.

Kyle, you posted something on LinkedIn today that resonated with me, and it wasn't about how much better in January—um, that was yesterday's post—um, but today's post was about how much you hate being ghosted. And I talk about this a lot with folks that I work with, folks that I've worked for. I think ghosting is fairly common, right? Sometimes you're being ghosted because your communication sucks, you know, Jen, to your point. Or, you know, maybe you're not looking at buyer psychology. Sometimes you're being ghosted for other reasons. How do we keep that from happening? How do we fix the sales process that encourages prospects and customers to not ghost us because we've been so obnoxious that we don't even feel like dealing with the response?

Yeah, I mean, you're never going to completely eliminate it. It'll still happen, like, no matter how good you are. But you can do a lot of things to make it less likely.

I think the biggest reason for ghosting is people will almost always take the easy way out, and it's a lot easier to delete an email and not pick up a phone call than to deliver hard, direct bad news, right? And so people will go silent for a couple of reasons.

One: They're not sure what the next step is. They're trying to figure it out, and they don't want to write back and say, hey, I don't know what to do next. I'm trying to figure it out. People don't like to admit confusion or weakness, right?

Then the other reason they might not be responding is they've received bad news on their side that makes it unlikely they're going to do business with you, and very few people want to go tell you that directly. They just want you to go away. To compound it, buyers are conditioned that reps will go into objection handling mode. And so the second they say, I'm not sure what to do next, you're going to jump in and try to solve their problem, even though you probably don't really know how, either. Or they say, you know what, this is no longer a priority, and they're going to come back with a list of 73 reasons why this should be a priority and you're an idiot for not putting it back on top of your list. No one wants to go through that, so they just disappear.

So the way you can mitigate this is one: being very clear from the beginning. The worst situation for either of us is we go through this process and you buy something that isn't going to work for you. You want to determine as quickly as possible: is this a good fit for both of us? If it's not on my side, I'll let you know. If it's not on

# Podcast Transcript

Your side. Will you please let me know condition them to know that you want to hear bad news? It's okay to share bad news. And then just be super transparent and honest with them every step of the way. I am fine telling customers why I may not be a good fit for them. I hope they will do the same thing for me.

The sooner you get away from navigating every sales process with "how do I get this customer's signature" to instead "how do I get them to make the best decision for them as quickly as possible," the more the communication will be open. The less likely you're going to end up ghosting you.

I hear expectation setting. Like expectations heading from the get-go. And I think most sellers, because we don't have this huge pipeline, we end up getting to a place of like we hold on to everything. So they don't want to go build more pipelines. So they hold on to things that aren't. They shouldn't be holding on to. And then you get into a place where you get into that place of like always hitting that same person up all the time.

So if you set the expectations up early like "hey, this may not be a good fit for either of us," and if they ghost, one of the things I usually like to do is send an email and be like "maybe I misunderstood that this may be a priority for you." Like give them that out. Because you're saying people don't want to give you bad news. But if you give them the opportunity to be like "maybe I misunderstood, it wasn't a priority for you, you know, we can definitely move on from this whole thing," I think they're more likely to at least give you a response that then you can at least move on from.

I think it's also important for sellers to realize that if you've had very infrequent conversations with somebody and they're no longer responding, they're not ghosting you. You just never had a deal to begin with, right? Like there's a very big difference between a deal that has velocity and ghosts you and a deal that you've been hanging on to for months just clinging to it that is now finally not tolerating your emails anymore. Those are very different things.

So why do we cling to those deals though, right? Like we've all been sellers, right? And I will say like there were times in my career where I certainly, and part of it for me was like shitty management. Like I'm afraid to go tell Jen, my boss, that like this deal is now closed loss. There's this stigma that closed loss sucks. I train my teams that closed lost is fine, right? Barring other things that have to go on. But don't keep stuff in your pipeline that doesn't belong there. But there's this mindset, Kyle, of like "oh, I gotta hold on to it, I gotta try, I gotta revive it." You're reviving nothing, right? Like at the end of the day, just because someone spoke to you one time doesn't mean this is a deal that belongs in your damn pipeline.

I think it's probably because you need to put a dress shirt on once in a while instead of a hoodie. But I do think it goes back to something Kyle said earlier. It's what we choose to celebrate inside of an organization. I can't tell you how many times I sat in a pipeline meeting where it's like we're celebrating that AE who has five million dollars in pipeline. We're like "we know this person ain't closing any of that," but like they're celebrated. And if you're behind, you are seeking any way to get recognition or celebration of your hard work. So pipeline, if you work for a leader who's like celebrating pipeline over pipeline quality, great way to do it.

Yeah, excellent. A lot of leaders will just look at numbers and not look at context. And I remember I was on a call and I was defending a rep, which may or may be I was in the right or it was in the wrong, but defending the rep. And the tongue-in-cheek response was "why the excuses?" I was like "honestly, it's not an excuse. This context, this is the context. Plan the performance." Because I've seen a lot of reps that will close a lot of business that I would actually stack rank well below somebody not currently closing a lot of business. And if you only run your business out of the dashboards, not with the context, you're going to miss really critical elements for long-term success.

Run your business. It's the VP's spreadsheets, right? Like anyone could sit there and hit refresh. I say all the time, like with pipeline meetings, Jen, to your point, or closing meetings, like I don't need a meeting to go over the damn dashboard. We all see the same dashboard. We don't need a meeting for that. Kyle, to your point, the meeting, the conversation is for the context. Not to look at the fact that Kyle has five dollars—no, I'm kidding. Not to look at the fact that Kyle's got a ton of pipeline or Jen doesn't have a ton of pipeline. Why is there a pipeline? Why are the deals closing? Why did this deal get pushed 30 days? There's so much like "oh, you know, we have to create urgency." That's one of my least favorite quotes ever. You're not creating urgency. The deal pushed 30 days. Well, why did it push 30 days? Let's try to understand that.

And right, because you didn't know the value, right? Like we have this, I mean probably because you were wearing a dress shirt and not a hoodie and your buyer thought you were a little too uptight. But you know, I think we get stuck into non-value proposition conversations. Like every conversation or email or presentation should deliver some kind of value that we're giving to the buyer. And if the buyer is not seeing any value anymore, they're just going to jump. Like that's just the end of the let's see—it's the beginning and the end.

And I tell a lot of people, if your deals are pushing, they do it. It's not like they see so much value that they have to have it tomorrow. Because back to what Kyle was talking about earlier, like the value proposition is at the end. Like when are you going to deliver value? If they really need value in October and they're pushing off a month, like it's just not that important to them. If there's value, you don't have to send the email that says "hey, Jen, I'm just checking in," because the—you know what, the price is. You know what the dates are. You know what the mutual success criteria we've talked about is. You don't need to check in because you want to communicate with me as much as I want to communicate with you.

So in the spirit of value, let yeah, go ahead, please.

I had a really great leader who was really hard on us, which I think all great sales leaders are. And one of the things that he did is when we brought a deal to a pipeline review, he, before he asked anything about the deal, he was like "what does the company sell? How do they sell it? Who do they sell it to?" If you couldn't answer those questions, he was like "you don't even have a deal. Get out. Like we're not wasting our time on you today."

And so I think it goes back to Kyle talking about context. It's context for deals too. Like we allow people to sit there and convince us that they have deals when you say the same things consistently as a leader, people start adopting the behaviors you want. When it's different every Monday, Wednesday, Tuesday, Friday, like of course we're going to see people trying to game the system.

So sorry to cut you off, but I always love that. No, please. The show is for you. I do think Kyle, I need to get you a snippet of that because Jen praised you. And we'll need to make sure that you're able to keep that secret for all time and like drop it on LinkedIn. Really smart things, and it's not his normal behavior.

I don't know, Kyle. I have a teleprompter behind my monitor just like all these really smart things. Let me know, emails should be short and fifth-grade reading level. I always say you need to have the Twitter, the value proposition in Twitter. Headline, 40 characters, 140 characters or less. Can you do it? Not me. You can. I can't get into Twitter, but you're right.

I had this conversation with the founder about an elevator pitch. Right? Their elevator pitch was a paragraph and a half. I'm like "that's not a damn elevator pitch," like it's crazy.

So we're talking about value and giving value. And one of the things that we believe in very strongly, collectively, is giving more than you get and giving back to our audience. And both of you have been so kind to offer up something to give to a member of our audience. So I'm gonna go to Kyle first. Chat about what you're gonna share with us.

Yeah, so I put together a collection of the top frameworks I've used as a sales rep, sales leader, over the years. I've had a lot of people use it effectively. I'm gonna offer a free copy to a member of the audience that Adam, you and Dale select.

I love it. I purchased said frameworks. For everyone listening, like wasn't given them. I actually gave Kyle money. Um, these. That's why he came on the podcast, it might be. Um, these are worth it. You want these frameworks? I promise.

So Jen, you know, when you said "nobody's ever bought any of my frameworks," I am the one person. Damn it. A customer. I'm proud of you. I think that's your picture in the background, Adam, over there.

# Transcript

On Kyle's screensaver smiling, he's like, "I have a customer, Jen, what about you? You had something pretty cool also?"

Yeah, I am gonna give away one year of Lavender Pro. And so I've sat here and harped on about how important our communication is in sales. And I love the idea of giving a gift to a listener. So the listener you pick will get to use it and help them write emails that set them off on the right foot in a sales process. I love it. Abner kicks ass. Awesome.

We're rapping, we're getting near the end. We're getting near the end. So we're gonna do some rapid-fire questions for you guys. We're not totally prepared for this, but let's start it off. What's the first one, Adam?

All right, Kyle, what song would best describe your revenue strategy?

Oh my goodness. Oh geez. Kyle, I've got one if you need a lifeline. Mine would be Juvenile, "Back That Ass Up," because most problems in a sales process start in the beginning, not in the end. So that's what I'm going with.

That's awesome. That might be the best answer we've ever had, by the way. And that makes no sense since you're episode one, but we have recorded other episodes. That's awesome.

Kyle, we'll go back to you. If you had a crystal ball and there's one revenue trend that you think is gonna take center stage the next 12 to 18 months, what's that one trend that you still see sticking around in 12 months?

I think when it comes to it, companies are gonna look a lot closer at sales productivity. And they're going to do a whole lot less of increasing headcount, increasing targets to hit numbers, and more around increasing sales productivity with their best reps.

Great one. Yeah, I love it. Jen, anything to add there? Anything different?

I mean, it's this stupid two letters that I don't really want to say, but we have to. I think it's gonna be AI-izing every little bit. And I think we're gonna see a hype cycle just like we do with any new technology, where we try to use it for everything, we get smarter, we realize it's not meant to solve all the world's problems, and then we back up and look at ways we can use it for quality, not just quantity or efficiency. Just like Juvenile said.

There you go. So you're gonna have it back in action.

Jen, if you could only choose one, would you focus on customer retention or customer acquisition?

Oh, customer retention, because great customers will bring you new customers.

Awesome. Kyle, one lesser-known tip that may be surprising or may make a surprising difference in revenue outcomes for you that you can give to the group?

I mean, I think I'm going to piggyback on what Jen talked about earlier around onboarding. I think onboarding being sometimes slower will actually improve rep ramp time, right? And so I have a learning product. Look at the lens first of not just "here's our product," but "what our customers care about." This part of the product requires a different order, a different timeline, but we'll actually improve rep ramp time despite onboarding taking longer. We're seeing that right now in my group, and I think that's actually a really sound observation. Yeah, awesome. I love it.

Do you have the last one?

All right, I'll play it. So this one's for both of you. I'll start with Jen. Jen, earlier in the show, you said that if you were not in community and marketing, you would go back to sales. So it's tomorrow morning, you are now a VP of Sales. What is the very first thing that you're gonna do?

I'm gonna make sure Kyle's not my... Jen can't afford me.

Um, so the first thing I would do—it's July, we run on a calendar fiscal—I'm pulling a list of every opportunity that was worked in the first half, and I'm sitting down and understanding: was this deal lost to status quo? Was it lost to a competitor? Was this deal lost to price? What is the root of why we're losing? And then start making some decisions around what are we going to test to stop losing to those things?

I don't even think I'd probably have to pull it. I would assume it's going to be status quo because status quo is killing everybody. But I would make sure that we have a very intentional strategy to defeat status quo as opposed to just like, "Let's hope things get better in the second half."

Good one. Kyle, you're RevOps. You're revving up. What is the first thing you're gonna do?

The first thing I'm going to do is understand every single ratio in the business. I want to understand: prospecting outreach to discovery meeting set, discovery meeting to quality opportunity, qualified op to deal closed, the time it takes all those things. Because the second I have that data, I'll have a pretty good hypothesis of who our biggest issues are—whether it's territory management, whether it's ICP, whether it's the sales process, whether it's our messaging—and at least let me know where to begin to focus. Otherwise, it's just too big of an ocean to boil.

Good one. Great point. Great point.

Wow, I cannot believe 45 minutes has gone by. I could sit in banter with y'all for hours. I want to thank you both. Seriously, from the bottom of our hearts, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Shameless plug time. Where can people find you? What's the best way to engage with you? Jen, you get to go first.

LinkedIn, very active on LinkedIn. I'm not active on threads. I only pick on Kyle on Twitter. It's the only reason I have a Twitter account, so I'm not even gonna tell you. So LinkedIn's the best place. And Lavender's at lavender.ai.

I love it. Thank you, Kyle.

You can find me just trying to get away from Jen, so whoever Jen is, I'm not. But other than that, LinkedIn. And then sales. My website is salesinterbridge.com. Look out for a new website and a new rebrand coming soon. Drop the hints, guys.

Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. We look forward to chatting with you all soon. Thank you.