Win More B2B Deals by Pitching Quantitative ROI | Ryan Milligan

You have to have a very clear ROI laid out that the buyer agrees to as to why what justifies the purchase of the product.

Define what "better" means because better isn't going to help me get you to success. Is better three? Is better ten? Is better 154? Like, in order for me to know that I think sellers have to be leading with the quantitative ROI.

Welcome back to another episode of the Bridge the Gap podcast powered by Revenue Reimagined. Today's guest is Ryan Milligan, who's the Chief Revenue Officer at QuotaPath. He's an expert in building scalable revenue systems for high-growth companies and followed what I like to call an untraditional path, which we'll talk about. He's not a sales leader to CRO. He's not a marketing leader to CRO. He is a RevOps leader to CRO, and you all know how much I love me some RevOps. So we're going to talk about this for a bit. He's helped companies align their GTM teams, create clear sales compensation structures, build forecasting models that link sales performance to business outcomes, and he's the man behind many of the systems that help organizations scale their revenue efficiently. Hence, RevOps to CRO, not sales leader to CRO. This episode's about building better sales performance systems, aligning revenue teams, and ensuring that activity translates into real measurable business growth. Ryan Milligan, thanks for joining the show.

>> Adam Dale, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

>> Yeah.

>> It was my decision.

>> Dale, just thank me. No, okay.

>> Yeah, because he's such a RevOps nerd, he's like, "I need to have someone else that I can talk with besides Dale because he doesn't know anything about RevOps."

>> See, that's Dale pretending not to know about RevOps so everyone else does his work. He knows deeply about RevOps and how to build it. He's just, "I don't know what's HubSpot."

>> I mean, if you can pretend you're naive in the systems in place and just have people go build it for you, it's a great system, you know. I should do that more.

>> That's the secret to RevOps. Pretend you don't know how. No, I'm kidding. All right, sorry, I stepped on you.

>> That's so funny.

>> Yeah, no. And you and what Adam was talking about in your intro was building scalable revenue operations. So you've been at the forefront of scaling RevOps for companies. What does a scalable revenue system actually look like?

>> Yeah, it's a great question. I think the biggest piece of it to me is that everybody in your organization knows what great revenue looks like. I think that's the biggest challenge in the workspace. If you don't have a clearly defined ICP with a clearly defined problem they're trying to solve and what a great new customer looks like—that the board is celebrating, your sales leader is celebrating, your account management and post-sales teams are all evenly celebrating that this is a great customer for us to bring on and land and expand—that is like the fundamental piece. And I think, you know, I'm a little bit biased, but comp plays a very big role in that. Like, how do you motivate broad components of a team across your BDRs, AEs, AMs to all care about the same types of customers and all bring them on and expand them. So the fundamental architecture—we'll get more into it—for me is you all know what a great customer looks like and you know it when you see it, and that is the type of customer you're building around to improve, you know, expansion and revenue retention for the business.

>> So talk about the comp for a second. We say a lot that comp drives behavior, right? I think I've posted about it no fewer than a dozen times. Dale's posted about it no fewer than a dozen times. But I actually, oddly enough, had a sales leader push back on me last week when I made a very similar post about compensation driving behavior. It was tied more to CS actually than it was to sales. I think we're very used to this in sales. How do you bring that across the board and get executives to really buy in and lean into the fact that to get the behavior you want, compensation's going to have to drive that.

>> Yeah, I think there's a couple things that I typically think about. One is sharing a lot of the data we've done from experimentation with customers—these kind of pre-post analyses—what percentage of your revenue was great revenue before you ran some sort of accelerator and after. And that's a lot of the work that we do here at QuotaPath. So I lead the go-to-market teams here at QuotaPath and we try to help you use your comp plan to drive better performance from your reps, right? We save you time calculating and paying commissions, but the unique thing is, hey, let's help you use your comp plan to actually drive changes in behavior. And so we try to show some of these stories. You know, prior to using a tool like QuotaPath and accelerating the commission rate for, let's say, multi-year deals—we had one customer we were working with that had 15% of their new business revenue in multi-year deals. And we said, "Hey, let's run a test. Double your commission rate. You're going to pay on two-year deals because on the total contract value, it's effectively a wash and you also don't have to pay the AM to renew it. It's actually slightly cheaper for you. Double the rate. You're not going to do that forever, but double the rate for a quarter. Set aside fifty grand. Let's test this and see." And what happened was this customer bumped the percentage of their new business contracts in multi-year contracts from 15% one quarter to 75% the next quarter because the reps saw how much more lucrative it was for them to go close these longer-term contracts. Now, you have to explain to the rep, "Hey, we're going to spike and decline, right? You're not going to always earn two times the rate, but take advantage of the comp plan and take advantage of the business to show that we can change the shape of this revenue and then kind of shade it off over time." And from a CS perspective, I think the same thing rings true. It's CSMs and AMs are in these renewal negotiations and they want to know what the gives and gets are for the business. And they want to be aligned from a compensation perspective to those gives and gets so they're more excited for longer-term renewals or renewals with testimonials or other things that they can fight for even if they're getting in a little bit of a challenge on the total commercials. And so having the AM aligned with that as well to try to secure a win for the business and then a win for their wallet—you rarely have that opportunity these days. And that's what we've seen a lot with our customers.

>> So I want to click into that for a second. So I don't think it was you. Maybe it was. Someone posted about this on LinkedIn the other day about doubling comp on multi-year deals or on three-year deals, et cetera. And there was a good amount of pushback in the comments of, "Oh, I'd love to see the CFO who approved that," and, you know, how does that play into CAC? And like, how do you gain CFO buy-in for that? Like, how much modeling, especially as a RevOps leader Ryan, how much modeling do you actually have to do to go and say, "Listen, yes, you're absolutely going to pay more, and on the surface, this makes no sense whatsoever," but here's why. And I like what you're talking about, right? Like, at the end of the day, there is a dollar figure associated with going and having to renew this. How do you balance that? And how do you model that?

>> So I think there's a couple things. One, you look at your revenue retention. Every time you have a renewal, you say, "Okay, how much revenue am I typically losing when orgs are renewing?" And so you're taking that—like your GRR shave off—and putting it in the accelerator as like one real dollar impact because these customers aren't renewing. Then you're figuring out what you're paying your AM, your director of AM, and potentially your CRO on these renewals. So the less renewals you're running, you're paying less commission on those, and that's going into the new business or even the AM's comp for driving a longer-term renewal, right? And then you're going through and figuring out the overall tax that going through a renewal process is having from a cost perspective outside of just the commission—like, how much time your AMs are spending. And you're presenting those three things together to your CFO, and then you're asking, "How much happier would you be if all of our contracts in these long-term deals?" You have the quantitative set of metrics. Of life, like from a mental standpoint, so a quality of life, but it's also—I mean, it's a board narrative conversation. You're improving gross net revenue retention. How much healthier does your revenue present, right? And then how much do you value this? And what we tend to see is the average CFO values a two-year contract 40 to 50% more than they value a one-year contract. Yet they're only willing to pay a rep 10% more on a two-year deal. And so those incentives are just misaligned, especially when the rep is discounting two-year deals much more than they're discounting one-year deals, shaving into that incremental earnings. So that's the piece that I play around with with the CFOs that I talk to: if I could tell you overnight all your deals would be two-year deals, how much would you pay for it? And they say much more than a 10% bump in the commission rate for me.

>> Sure. Absolutely.

And I think that's the story.

And the other... so I had a quick question going a bit off topic because this is happening as we speak as we talk with our clients. Any comp plan building—are you putting GRR in sales comp plans versus CS comp plans?

We hear it a lot. I think that there's a couple things you have to keep in mind. One is there's a distance between selling the deal and the act of renewing. And so it can feel quite punitive if you're closing a deal today and you're measured on whether they're renewing a year from now or ideally two or three years from now. That gap from a comp incentive perspective is challenging. What we see more organizations doing is they'll use an early signal of success. So they'll comp on implementation complete, or they'll comp on an early call scheduled, or something that's a little tighter to show that. Or they'll comp on whether they're using the product effectively in the first 30 days, because you want the comp plan to drive the seller to change their behavior and have that immediate feedback loop. And if the feedback loop's not a year or two years from now, they're not going to change how they're operating. If the Jones account that I closed in 2024 churns in 2026, I'm a whole different seller than I was two years ago.

So before you, Adam, go—because I can see him winding up.

You know me so well.

So one of the problems that I'm seeing is that this growth-at-all-cost mentality that is kind of a lingering issue from a couple years ago is not selling into the ICP. And you may not see that in the first 30, 60 days as you're implementing, but as you're getting towards renewal, the value proposition that you promised in the sales process—whether right, wrong, or indifferent—is not being held. So I like where you're going with it, but I think we need to extend it out a little bit more into whether you're really selling into our ICP, which to me becomes a leadership thing versus a compensation thing.

Well, then the other thing I would say is: do you know your ICP in a completely binary perspective? And if you do—

No, most people do not.

And so like we do, for example. So I can tell you, hey, this percentage of our business is ICP and this percentage is not. And can you accelerate the commission rate for ICP or decelerate for non-ICP, or have something be in the middle where at least 50% of your contracts have to be ICP in order to earn your full commission rate or something like that. So I think there's things...

And then the question is, like, when your ICP changes, do you know enough that your ICP is changing six months from now? Because the problem with ICP or buying persona or any of these things—as market changes, as features change and shift, as competitors change and shift—like your ICP is probably going to change. And people are like, "I did an ICP work 12 months ago." I'm like, "It's outdated."

Well, you should. I mean, with all the tooling we have today, you should be doing that much more frequently than every 12 months.

How frequently? How frequently should you be looking at your ICP? I'm going to sidetrack and then I do a question to get back to—

No, it's great. I mean, we try to run it quarterly to ensure that we have the proper assumptions in place. And it doesn't have to be too complicated. It's look at your markers of ICP versus non-ICP. What are your gross and net dollar retentions of those? Is there a gap that you expect there to be? And how do your win rates differ and overall product adoption? And just like, does that pass the sniff test of like, this is a very distinct group of people who are getting a lot more value than these other customers? And if not, then it opens much deeper speculation and investigation. But really, I think people overcomplicate ICP candidly. I think it's: who are the people who are the most successful in your product and show that with their usage and their dollars? And if you don't have a clear distinction between your ICP and non-ICP performance, then that warrants a re-architecture. But most times, I don't think it tends to.

So you talked—this is the second or third time you mentioned time to value. And I think that's something really important. Manny Medina posted this weekend on LinkedIn about time to value and switching to consumption-based pricing and value-based pricing, and how everyone needs to stop talking about ARR, compensating on ARR from the board level down to the C-level, down to the IC level. How does that, Ryan, affect... well, first off, do you align with that? I'll start there. Do you think we need to stop talking ARR and start talking value and consumption?

I'm a bit torn on this, I'll be honest. I think the challenge that I have with a consumption-based pricing model is that for some businesses it makes a lot of sense where the value is a function of their consumption. For others, you're trying to force this trendy consumption-based model into a business that doesn't necessarily derive or get a lot of value out of a consumption-based model. But, plus, I don't think—Andrew, is my phone going off? I don't think the average—

You can answer it.

Plus I don't think the average CFO, from a buying perspective, is super excited to buy consumption-based pricing software because they can't model out the cost of that in their business. I think it's very fruitful for a business to have consumption-based pricing, but for a buyer or a customer of consumption-based pricing, it leads to many headaches in terms of modeling the cost of these tools they're using over the long term. So I think there are certain businesses that certainly benefit from consumption-based pricing, or that makes sense because the more you use it, the more value you're getting out of it. There are other tools that you're not using all that much, but you're getting a lot of discrete value when they're being used, or there are certain moments of time in which they're being used that derive a lot of value, where I think we're forcing consumption-based pricing onto models that don't necessarily require it.

So I think that makes a ton of sense. I agree with you. I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all for hardly anything in life. So I think it's very difficult to say "Oh, consumption" or "Oh, ARR," and I think they all have their place. I think I could look at a lot of businesses that I've worked with or even know of where if you tried to do consumption, like I just don't even know where you would begin.

Here's something I keep seeing with sales teams I work with. Generic sequences don't work anymore. We've all gotten so good at tuning out the noise that even your own buyers are annoying you. The problem isn't your reps. It's that your sequences are static and your signals are somewhere else entirely. That's why our clients use Nooks. And the thing that stuck with me is that their sequences actually stay fresh because the signals update them automatically. Right buyer, right moment with no manual babysitting. If your outbound feels like it's shouting into a void, go check them out at nooks.ai/bridgethegap.

And then I look at others where it's like, yeah, you're right. ARR doesn't make sense. We have a client that's in the services space and they keep calling it ARR, and like I think Dale and I are both like, this is not annual recurring revenue. No matter how you look at it, how you slice it, there's no way this is ARR.

Sure.

But when it does come to whether it be consumption, whether it be value, like how do you build a comp plan or an accelerator based on value? Because I do love that for the CS side. So my wife leads a CS team of almost 100 people.

Yeah.

And one of the big conversations that they have all the time with comp is time to value, right? We have to get people in the product doing whatever it is they need to do by X amount of time because we know if they don't do this within X number of days, they're going to turn within Y number of days.

Sure.

How do you build that comp plan and drive that behavior so that your CSMs understand the importance of it, other than what I find to be the normal conversation, which is, "Ryan, listen, like we know that Billy Bob needs to go in and do these three actions within the first month. So it's really important that you go get them to do that. Like go, go, go."

Yeah, it's interesting. I think that it really depends on the role of each person within the organization to define how to lay that out. I think a lot of times, time to value, I tend to see a lot more tied to these implementation or CS initial adopter types of roles, where maybe the CSM is responsible for implementation and the AM is responsible for the commercial relationship potentially. And in a lot of those, I do love, "Hey, you're completing implementation in X period of time," or "They're running X operations." So like for QuotaPath, they're paying their team in QuotaPath within the first 90 days is like a very major signal of value, and you're getting your variable comp as a function of that, and you can have a quota that...

Is implemented dollars that did X within Y period, which I love. And so you're totally owning or deriving that value, and are they getting value early on in the process? I think the one thing you have to be careful of in the full cycle—so if an AM was responsible for both implementation and ongoing value—is making sure that you're not having too many variables that confuse an account manager who's responsible for both up and running and longer-term gross and net dollar retention. And so what I typically advise there is those upfront signals like time to value or getting up and running in the product in X days are an early indicator of their likelihood to renew and expand over some period of time. And so you're coaching your way with your AMs through a lot of that, making sure they're up and running so that they know the correlation between whether they'll renew in 6 and 9 months' time.

Love it. 100% makes sense. I do think one of these really interesting things is probably four or five years ago there was this rise of CSMs and AMs, and the notion was these CSMs should not be commercially measured, right? They should be the good guy, bad guy relationship with the customer.

Oh, I'm going to mute when you're done with this because Dale feels strongly about this, and I know he's going to have a lot to say.

So there was this whole notion that okay, the AM is responsible for the commercial relationship—they're the person basically trying to get you to pay more money—and then the CSM is like your buddy who's not trying to get you to pay more money, just wants you to be happy. And there was this weird overall tension. I felt it buying a lot of software where I'd work with a CSM all the time and have a great relationship, and then an AM would come over the top and try to get me to expand or buy some other package or something. It felt very clunky and disjointed. My take is that everybody needs to be variable compensated. Everybody in the org needs to be measured on how well the customer does, and they should care about how successful the customer is in a CSM role, in an AM role, what have you. And so my push in these conversations always is: if you have somebody who's working with a customer who's not variably compensated, then how are you measuring in a quantitative way how much value they are deriving or giving to the customer? And I'm glad we're shifting past that, but it was a very big SaaS era thing to have these good guy CSM situations.

You're on mute, Dale. You sound amazing. Best you've sounded all morning.

I think there's fundamentally a challenge with what CSMs have always been running, which has been like project manager-type base people. They've been the friendly people. We get into this a lot with how do we educate them on revenue? Do they even want to do revenue? That's part of the problem. And if your organization is big enough to have salespeople, AMs, and CSMs, like it feels very clunky anyway, unless you almost split it up where you have AMs being responsible for expansion, then you have CSMs being responsible for retention and renewal. And so you can start targeting them on GRR versus NRR and like you kind of work that whole process through. We're working with clients right now and doing deep dives into the GRR. You see NRR going up like this and you see GRR flattening out, going down. It's a very difficult world to play those two together.

I wanted to go back one piece though. When you were talking a little bit about time to value and values within the CSM, I think the biggest challenge that we have in that space is that it's not set up properly from the sales team. The sales team is not really articulating what the value should be or what the customer can derive because they're worried that they're not going to deliver or whatever the challenges are. But if the CSM isn't aligned with the salesperson and the customer in the sales process, before you close it, and we all line on what we're trying to align on for value... we were just talking with a group on some of our podcast stuff. And one of the questions is: what does value look like for you? And that's the best question because if we can't define that in the pre-sale, it's not going to get defined in the post-sale. I don't care what this is because what's going to happen is the people that you're selling to—the buying committee on the pre-sale side—is not the same people that, 90% of the time, are the people that are doing the implementation work. They probably don't even know what the real problem is because they're diagnosing a symptom versus what the real problem is. And then like you're starting to do the implementation work and they're like, "I know you were told like this is the problem, but our real problem is ABC." And like now what do you do? Now you've got to go back to the salesperson and buying committee. So I actually think that value, that impact—we do a lot with impact on the front end—needs to be established. And if it's not, then you are not going to reach it.

Yeah, and I think the question in the sales process—I completely agree. The question in the sales process has to be: "In 6 months, what would make you really happy and excited to continue using this product?" And for us, I mean, we have a pretty clear: "Hey, I want to build the confidence. I want to calculate the commissions. I want my reps to be excited." But I try to have the new business team basically...

But that's very... That's not like—you've got to get real specific on the value of it. They're going to pay whatever amount of money for it. So not only do they want to be able to use it, but they have to like—in my mind, you have to correlate it to some revenue value, whether it's decreasing expenses, increasing revenue, whatever. Don't talk in the vague terms.

You have to have a very clear ROI laid out that the buyer agrees to—as to what justifies the purchase of the product, right? And I think what's been really interesting to me is you don't see that a lot though.

Yeah, and it drives me crazy. That's the problem.

You get random things like "I want to do something better." It's like, okay, what does better mean to you?

Yeah. And not to sidetrack, but like Ryan—we were on a call, I don't want to say being pitched, but we were on a sales call before this. And I thought Dale that Rachel did a really good job. Like I kept saying, "Oh, you know, we want this to be better," and she's like, "Define what better means because better isn't going to help me get you to success. Is better three? Is better ten? Is better 154? Like in order for me to know that we're hitting your objectives, what is better?" So to your point of this conversation, I don't think a lot of people do a really good job. Just saying "This is going to solve for you and you want this product. What does success actually look like to you?" Solving the problem is way too vague.

Well, and I think sellers have to be leading with the quantitative ROI. So you think about Quota Path, right? We help you save time calculating and paying commissions. We save time from your reps who are shadow accounting and checking the math in their Excel spreadsheets. You then have rep attrition problems—the cost of losing your top rep if you pay them incorrectly. And then we're driving better performance, right? But even those four sentences aren't enough. You have to say: an average admin spends 8 hours a month at 100 bucks an hour calculating and paying commissions. An average rep spends... and you quantitatively lay out: "This will drive 18x ROI for you because here's all the money you're saving. Here's the extra lift in attainment we typically see—you know, a 1 to 2% quota attainment lift in the first 6 months. All of that stacked into your team size divided by your cost—that better be 5x, if not 10x or more. Or else you're not making a quantitative case." And it's amazing how many people won't go to just the numbers of that. They'll just say, "Oh, we're going to save you time." And it's like, okay, well, how valuable is time?

Which is the weakest value prop ever.

Weakest prop. Yes, exactly. Which is why we value performance and like driving better behavior because it's a much stronger value prop than saving time. So what are you going to do with that time? Like, you know, I could just work some more hours.

That's what I was going to say. Like, okay, so you're going to play with Cloudera 10 more hours? Like, what are you going to do with the extra time that you have, right? And I think that becomes a slippery slope. And then I think people do get...

Stuck on the other side is like you don't have the ability to change everything that happens in that process either. So you may be only one small part of the overall quota attainment type of thing, right? So they get really into the measurement piece of it.

Yeah, but I do think these orgs have to set loftier goals for how they're being measured within an organization. And so what I push my reps for a lot is we're not solving the process of calculating and paying commissions because if that's all you're doing, you go build a Claud tool tomorrow that will just calculate commissions, a better, faster Excel. We're trying to help you use your comp plan to drive the right type of revenue that your business needs in order to hit revenue targets, do fundraising. You have to ladder up all the way to QuotaPath helps you achieve your revenue goals for long-term success. And if you don't get there, then a buyer's not going to be able to make the case for you. And so that's where I try to ladder up with our reps to say, "You're not saving time, you're fundamentally changing the shape of the revenue of this business." And we've seen that within our own business, our customers have too, but it requires a lot more work to justify that ROI for sure.

And you also have to put your, I think you have to push your buyers because the other challenge that I see a lot is you can calculate what the ROI is essentially, but they don't have a baseline. Like there's no baseline. So they're like, "I want to increase this by 10% and that'll generate X in revenue." Okay, where's our baseline? Well, we haven't really measured that. And they're like, "Oh, it's this amount or this amount." And it's some range. It's like, "What's your average deal size?" "I don't know, from 10 to 80k a year." I'm like, "Okay, that's not an average deal size." And so I find it very difficult when you're selling in conversations or when we're working with our clients to say, "What's the baseline and how are you going to attack the baseline to impact?"

Yeah, for sure. No, it's a really important point for sure.

Comp drives so much and so many people get it wrong. I love, listen, I'm a huge QuotaPath fan. I love what you guys do, but I think you nailed it on the head, right? Like we're not building you a comp calculator. Anyone could build a comp calculator. I could build Excel spreadsheets now that I never would be able to before because of Claude, so could anyone else, right? Like if it's just comp, wrong tool. But I think what you just said applies to QuotaPath and everyone else. We've talked a lot about comp driving behavior, but in the age of AI now and being able to code anything you want, your product has to be more defensible than ever before. And I think a lot of people are failing on that. So with our last few minutes before we go into rapid fire, talk to me about some of the changes you guys have had to make and where you think other people have to make changes to make that product defensible in the world of AI. If we're just a calculator or if we're just a call recording tool or if we're just an insert-it-here, go build that in Claude because everyone now thinks they could go build a tool in Claude. Other than enterprise security, and I'd argue that you need more than enterprise security that Claude can't give you either.

Yeah, so I think there's been a couple areas we've focused. One has been in the depth of partnership. Graham Collins who runs our partnership side has done a great job getting quite embedded.

Used to be chief of staff, right?

Yes.

Yeah, so awesome. Stepped into a chief of partnerships role. And has done a great job embedding QuotaPath in the systems where our reps and our orgs are. So we are the only tool that pushes commission calculations and forecasting back into HubSpot, for example. Or we push commissions directly into Rippling for payroll. And so the stickier you can get in embedding your product that you've built in these other products, you know, you can build a Claude tool that pulls from your CRM and calculates the commissions, but that tool is not then going to push this data into your next payroll run. It's not going to push into CRM for your reps to see. And so that level of connectivity with other tools steps beyond what you're going to calculate in a tool like Claude.

The second thing is we want commissions to be a team sport. So the model of okay, hey, I'm going to build a tool that allows me to download data from my CS or CRM, throw it into this Claude tool and calculate commissions, that works if you are singularly responsible for the act of calculating and paying commissions. What we are trying to do is actually use the comp plan to drive change of behavior. So it needs to be front and center with the reps. The reps need to see how much deals they have in pipeline. They need to forecast, hey, if I close this deal versus this deal, this is how much more money I'm going to make. I'm going to make this much more money because it's a two-year multi-product deal versus a one-year single-product deal. And even if it may be a cheaper, it may be a lower ARR deal, but it makes me more money because it's better for the business. And so yes, could you go build a tool in Claude that calculates commissions? Absolutely. But what we really focused on is the depth of partnerships and pushing that data to the places where reps tend to be and then making commissions this team sport that's actually driving a change in behavior that you can't provision and do in a tool like Claude. And so those are the two places where we've seen a lot of our unique differentiation.

I love that. I think that's a great place to shift into rapid fire, but not just for QuotaPath, everyone. If your tool isn't making things number one a team sport, number two adding value, and number three really showing how and why your tool solves X problem very specifically, you're going to find yourself out of business. Now that said, I think we see a lot on LinkedIn of Claude just killed every SDR ever and Claude just killed every, Claude's going to kill QuickBooks. Listen folks, Claude ain't killing QuickBooks, okay? I think Claude could do some pretty good accounting things, but Claude is not killing QuickBooks. But I do think we live in a world, whether you're QuotaPath, QuickBooks, Revenue Reimagined, pick your poison, adopt or die, y'all, because AI is coming for you and you have to be defensible.

With that, let's move into some rapid fire. So here's the rules: 10 words or less is the goal. What is one sales metric you think that companies overuse?

Pipeline coverage.

Ooh man, I wish we could go into that. I agree.

A tool you can't live without in RevOps?

Gong.

Mm-hmm. Spicy. I have a spicy take on that, but another story for another time. Ryan, what's the most important trait for a RevOps leader?

Empathy and curiosity.

Loved that. Now let's flip it. One leadership trait that every CRO must possess.

Willingness to get in the weeds.

Can't be the same. Okay.

Yeah, I think CROs try to sit too high and they don't spar deeply enough with teams.

I love that. What's one thing that sales teams should stop doing immediately? You come in, you're the new CRO, what are you telling them to stop?

Disjointed discovery calls.

Talk to Adam. Like BDR disco, then AE doing the same disco, then more disco.

Then the demo, then another disco.

Exactly. A lot of dancing happening. Awesome. Last one, Ryan. Dream vacation destination.

Japan.

Nice. We're getting a lot of Japan lately.

Trying to go. It's our 10-year wedding anniversary in September. So we're trying to go in the spring. That's the goal.

Nice. Happy anniversary, man.

Happy anniversary.

It's on my list as well. Ryan Milligan, thanks for joining the show. Y'all go check out QuotaPath. Listen, I am not a sponsor. I am not a paid promoter. I am however a big believer and big fan of what Ryan, AJ, Grant, and team are building over there. If you are trying to solve your comp problems and let's face it, y'all are, go check out QuotaPath. Follow Ryan on LinkedIn. Ryan, thanks for joining the show, man.

Thanks so much for having me. Really enjoyed that.

Thanks, Ryan.