Your Startup Is Selling a Product That Doesn't Exist

Often times what we see going into an org, there's a lot of silos. Everyone's doing their own thing. They talk about a cohesive GTM strategy, but if you were to say, "What's your value proposition?" and ask everyone in the company, you're going to get 17 different answers. If you were to say, "Who's your ICP?" you're going to get six different answers. And no one is unified at all. There's a ton of finger pointing back and forth. And that is what I call chaos. So I think it's really important when we come in, one of the first questions that we ask is, what is the north star? What's the goal here?

So we have both been in rooms with hundreds, if not thousands, of revenue leaders and dozens, if not hundreds, of broken revenue orgs. But there was a time before Revenue Reimagined existed, right? We didn't just wake up and form RR. I'm curious for you—like, what was the moment? And I'm happy to answer this as well. But what was the moment where you said, "Shit, dude. Go to market's broken. No one's fixing it the right way, and I actually want to change this."

Actually, I'm going to surprise you a little bit. I don't know if I've ever really told you this story. When I knew go to market was broken was actually in 1999, and I know it very succinctly because of the Y2K bug. I was doing implementation work back from my coding days, and I was in New York City, staying there working tons of hours and nights. People were like the apocalypse is happening, like every clock is not going to work after 2000. I was in January 1st, like all the stuff that was going on. So I was coding all these SQL for a client in New York City. I was in the publishing software industry at the time, and I remembered a company and I remembered a woman, and we were going back and forth. I was doing a lot of extra work for them. It wasn't like, "Here, do this." I just had a plan. She was like, "I need this, I need this." And I was like, the woman's name was Anita. And I said, "Anita, I cannot do any more. I'm not getting my other work done. We have to go back to the sales guy and tell him we have to do a change order. I got to do a change order for you. I'm not getting my other work done." And she said, "I don't want to see your salesperson in this office ever again. All he cares about is his commission." I was like, and in true New York style, so pissed off. And at that moment I was like, as the implementation person on site, I thought to myself, something is broken here. If the customer and what we're being asked to do is not what they're expecting, and they have all these changes, and that's her mentality in this world from a customer perspective—I'm like, go to market is broken. And actually more succinctly, sales is broken.

And so that was the actual moment that I slipped into sales.

So you're older than I am. My realization wasn't in 1999. Dude, I was fresh out of high school a year before that. But nonetheless, when I look at where it was broken, I can't pinpoint a year, but I could pinpoint the same situation happening over and over again where I get hired at, you know, XYZ company. I genuinely believe in the product. Like, I could see how this product is going to solve real problems. I am a big believer that to be a salesperson, if you will, you're not going to be effective if you don't believe in the product. I have a friend who works for Office Depot. He makes a lot of money, but he sells paper clips. And I would be bored out of my mind. I know there are some people like that, but to me, the best sellers are the ones who truly believe in what they're selling. And I did. And I saw, whether I was a rep or a manager or even a VP, these great products become shelfware because no one knew how to spell go to market or how to build out a go to market motion. Like, you had this product that could do so much good, but because you couldn't get your head out of your ass on how to market it or how to sell it or how to retain those customers, millions and millions of dollars squandered. This great product becomes shelfware, doesn't even get sold off for its IP because they burn through all the money and just goes away into existence. And I had this mindset of, this is a shame. And it wasn't about saving founders. It wasn't about saving all the money. I mean, that's definitely where my head has gone now. But it was about saving the product. And that to me is, how do we fix go to market so that great products don't become shelfware, and we're stuck with more of the same mediocre products that are decent, but they knew how to go to market better.

Yeah, that's really valid as well. And I'll add one little tidbit as well. I felt very sequential in nature doing it one at a time with client after client, with person after person. And I felt like if we started Revenue Reimagined, we could do it for multiple people at a single time so you can multi-thread, which is probably some of my ADD kicking in. But I think that also helps.

As I sit here squeezing my needle, but let me ask this publicly because we get asked this all the time, and I agree with you—being able to help multiple people was a huge driving force. But Dale, how many hours are you giving me? Like, how do I know that you're going to spend time helping me if you have multiple clients? That comes up in every conversation.

And I think in 95% of the situations—I don't think anything's 100%—but people feel like we are their only customer a lot of times. And as you say all the time, we exchange money for outcomes, not money for hours. So this isn't like I'm going to give you five hours here. We're going to get the job done. And that's why we build out go to market sprints. We're building these things so that we're accountable and the client's accountable. It's not just Revenue Reimagined. Like, where challenges happen throughout an engagement could be on either side. And we both need to be accountable back to making sure it's at the highest level, like a CEO managing this process and pushing it.

Yeah. So before you joined, before we built Revenue Reimagined, I'm sorry, sir, you did not recruit me. I mean, you kind of did. We'll get there. We'll get there.

Yeah. Like we almost recruited each other. So this will be an interesting conversation. But you were a CRO before we started the company. What was a pattern you kept seeing from the inside that finally pushed you to build something instead of just fixing a company?

I mean, this is GTM Uncensored, so we're about to get real uncensored. And it kind of goes back to our story. A little bit, but I'm going to shift it from the product issues because it wasn't so much a product issue. It was a people issue, systems, and it was an honesty issue.

And I don't even think in one scenario it was very intentional. I've led revenue for several companies, and every single time as an early-stage revenue leader, I was brought in and I was sold like I was Andreessen Horowitz. Everything is amazing. Our revenue is fantastic. Our ARR is growing. Our churn is nothing. And you know, we just need someone to come in and tweak it a little bit. But your equity, you're going to get SpaceX equity. And there are two very specific scenarios I remember. So one, I was recruited by a recruiter that everyone listening to this show would know, that I would say was absolutely complicit in the lies that I was told. I was told that revenue was XYZ millions of dollars. This company built month-to-month contracts, so there was no contract. And the way they were recognizing revenue is they were taking every customer, multiplying it by 12, calling it ARR. And even if they canceled—dude, you have no idea—and even if they canceled after three months, they were still recognizing it as 12 months of revenue.

Flashbacks.

Active users.

Our retention. Yes. One of the questions I always ask is active users. You know, and they would talk to me about their active users, not counting the ones that have churned or weren't logging in. Like, if I say, you know, how many customers do you have? And they're like, oh, you know, 654. 368 of them haven't logged in in six months, dude. Like, that's not a customer regardless of what you say. And they're not paying you. So that was scenario number one where I was like, I can't go through this again. Like, because if it's happening here, it's happening all over. Like, one thing I'll say about what we do is—

We're a relatively close-knit community, right? Most good VPs of sales, good CROs, we all know each other and we all talk and trade war stories. The second one, we'll talk about the second one in a little bit, but suffice to say, there were some major product and major HR issues that were the straw that broke the camel's back. It was like, "Hey, this can't continue to happen."

But I just got tired of being sold to. I was an investor. I got tired of seeing other people I knew and trusted being the same, and seeing this 12 to 18-month tenure of a VP of sales or a CRO. I wanted to change it so that number one, good products don't become shelfware, and number two, when a company is ready to hire a sales leader, that sales leader can actually come in, make a difference, and last more than 12 months.

So let's flip this. We talk a lot about your coding background in go-to-market, which is fairly unusual, although I've seen it a few more times than I would have thought over the past six months or so. But when you look at coding versus go-to-market, how did that shape what you saw that career salespeople like myself, who've really never done anything else, completely miss?

Yeah, it's a good question. I think the evolution of going from technical to sales to solution engineering, then back to sales, is really the place where I saw both sides of the coin. And so I was able to see, back to what I was talking about with the example for the client in New York in '99. I saw it from the client perspective and I saw how painful that was. And then in my developer mind, I'm like, "Okay, there's got to be a system in place and a process in place, and like very one and zero."

The thing that really flipped my mind was when I became a solution engineer, sales engineer, whatever you want to call them, and I'd go into sales meetings. The salesperson would come in, they'd do their dog and pony show, they'd have their slides, they'd do all their stuff, and then there would be technical people in the room. I'd pay attention to the body language and what was happening. The technical people are like, "This is complete crap." And they had more power at that time.

When I was sitting and diagnosing the room, I would reach out to the technical people after and I'd get the real story. So you'd hear the mask of the story inside the room with the business and the salesperson. Then I'd get to be friends with the tech people. I'd be like having a conversation like, "I know Bob said that he's the decision maker, but he's really not the decision maker. It's really Jane. She was over in the corner. She was kind of quiet, but she's got all the decision-making power, and this is really what we need to do to try to win the deal."

So as a sales engineer, I always had an inside track because the people trusted you more than they trusted the salespeople. It was like a trust issue.

So when I went into sales, I always wanted to make sure one: back to your initial point of knowing the product, understanding the product deeply, and being able to know what your product's doing and how it's doing it—I believe that's super important.

And I also realized at that point that salespeople can't do everything either. Like, even when I became a salesperson, I couldn't be the technical person anymore because there's a divide of responsibilities. You have to stay in your lane, or else when you blur the lines, that can get messy as well. Because in my ego time of just getting into sales and being a sales engineer, I was like, "I don't want any sales engineer." I had to train the sales engineers to be the way I wanted them to be, and I didn't want to do that. But that caused a bunch of other issues.

So, to answer the question directly, I think it's understanding that there are technical components and there are business components. And while they tie together, you have to manage them separately to have a full picture.

Yeah, I agree with that. The SE piece is an interesting one, right? I've seen SEs that can most of the time make deals, sometimes break deals, but they're usually much more trusted than the salesperson because the theory is that they're not commission hungry. What most people don't realize is most SEs are paid on commission too. That's a whole separate conversation.

I got paid good on commission. I had two amazing sales reps, and I like that was the year I was like, "I want to go into sales," because I knew what I made and I knew.

You definitely knew they made more.

And one of my salespeople that I was selling into the government at the time—like the IRS—he bought tickets for me and my wife to go to Bruce Springsteen. I was like, "That was just kind of fun," because I had never done that. I was a technical person. Like, this is fun.

I love it. 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 turning out the noise that even your own buyers are ignoring 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.

Let's talk about how we found each other for a moment. And I want to get into a little bit of how we started and the messy version.

The uncensored version.

The uncensored version. Dude, we're completely opposite people in a lot of ways. We're very similar, but like a few examples. So, a lot of people who listen to the show, the old show, know some of this, but for those that are new, like you are nine times out of ten in a collared shirt. I am nine times out of ten in a t-shirt or a hoodie. I curse like a sailor. You are much more reserved. You tend to want to sleep on it. I tend to be more immediate reaction. You are more optimistic. I tend to be more worst-case scenario. There's a lot of differences and a lot of similarities as well. Was there a moment as this was forming that you were like, "Yeah, these personalities aren't going to jive," or conversely, like why did you say this is what will make a partnership work?

Woo. It's funny. Like, if I am completely taking all the walls down on this, I don't know if I would have ever gone into business with you five years ago, for example. And I never really thought I wanted to go into business with anybody else anyway. That was not.

Touché. Like, I didn't have it on the bingo card. I've been running my own company before you and I met, and I would always talk to people. Then I remember having a conversation and being like, "This seems like a good idea, but I don't know."

And the place where I realized that was because I'd already been working for myself for a little bit of time. I knew what I was not good at. I knew I hated invoicing. I hated the systems. I hated the operational pieces. Not that I couldn't do them, I just—it didn't excite me, and it was actually very draining. It was very pulling on my creative side of the world. So the creative side was getting snuffed out by all the operational pieces, and then I wouldn't send invoices on time. Like, all the stuff that I'm sure you'd make you cringe.

But then, as we were working together...

I'm literally here thinking, "Fuck, I got to pay us all today." And I'm like, but to that point, that is the piece that I don't know if we weren't working together—if that wouldn't be like I would have closed up shop—because that is a very big drain. And looking backwards from today, knowing that collaborating with you and Jake and being able to collaborate in real time versus like I need to go ask a question—now I get to Slack or call or text at him or any of the other GTM leaders that I've been friends with to get an answer. Like, having—as much as we get at each other's throats and do a bunch of jabbing at each other—it is having that back and forth that is actually mentally good for people because I hear a lot of people that are just on their own. They just go stir crazy.

Working with you was not on my bingo card. Being an entrepreneur was not on my bingo card. There was no point where I thought I was going to own my own company. Yeah, not on my bingo card at all.

Interesting. Did not expect that.

Yeah, I never wanted to do my own thing. I worked for some great founders.

I worked for some shitty founders, but you get so used to that guaranteed income, that W2, right? And I remember sitting and talking to my wife and being petrified of like, "What if we do this? What if I decide to do this?" And you were instrumental. You arguably convinced me to go out on my own, quote unquote, so to speak, before RR was started. And all I was thinking is like, "I have a family to support. I have a mortgage payment. I have a car payment. What if, what if, what if this doesn't work?" And I remember her looking at me and being like, "Listen, I have a great job. We're good. Like, you're never going to know if you don't ever." And I couldn't be happier with my decision. But when I look back to what got me here, I worked for what I would say is the most toxic company I've ever worked for. The product didn't exist. It was literally we were selling Figma mock-ups. I learned a whole lot about Figma and how to tell if something's real or if something's fake. But I remember two specific moments that I told you about that were my factors of like, "I'm never working for someone else again."

One was July 4th weekend, the weekend prior. I was in Scottsdale, Arizona for vacation for July 4th. I was working and I was on a demo to sell the product to a deal like the big payroll company, and they had called out on the demo that it was Figma. They picked up on it and it caused a major shitstorm. The CEO promised them that the whole product wasn't Figma and that this is just one part of it and it'll be ready by Monday. And she basically said that everyone had to work over the holiday weekend. And that was a hard line in the sand for me because there had been weeks of back and forth already about how we can't continue this stuff.

And I remember walking downstairs with Crystal late at night. It was like 11:30 at night and the CEO is sending me a barrage of like 54 text messages in a row. And that's not an exaggeration. One of which was, "I don't care if you're sleeping or doing whatever, but if I'm working, you need to be working."

That was number one. And then number two, a true story. I was in the city at the corporate headquarters. It was so toxic. And I remember talking to you and you were like, "Dude, just go out on your own." And this was before we had ever talked about Revenue Reimagined. And here we are, you know, three and a half, almost four years later, I think. Probably the single best career decision I've ever made.

Yeah, I feel the same way. It's interesting. The only thing I wish is I did it sooner, but then I don't know, like you never know what happens. So you don't know the whole process around it.

Adam, you talk about scaling chaos versus scaling systems. Give me a real life version of what this looks like.

Yeah. I think often times what you see or what we see going into an org is a lot of silos. Everyone's doing their own thing. They talk about a cohesive GTM strategy, but if you were to say, "What's your value proposition?" and ask everyone in the company, you're going to get 17 different answers. If you were to say, "Who's your ICP?" you're going to get six different answers. And no one is unified at all. There's a ton of fingerpointing back and forth. Everything is, "Oh, it's marketing's fault. It's sales' fault. It's customer success' fault. It's the CEO's fault." And everything is all over the place.

And the answer you typically see with these problems when we ask a company, "What are you doing to try to solve these issues?" is, "Well, we're going to hire more people or we're going to fire the VP of marketing and just replace the VP of marketing. It's his or her problem." And that's very rarely the answer. And that is what I call chaos because there's no unity, there's no teamwork, there's no collective vision, there's zero north star.

So I think it's really important when we come in, one of the first questions that we ask is, "What is the north star? What's the goal here?" And everyone else's individual departmental goals need to roll up to that goal because until you have everyone charging towards the same goal, you are literally adding gas to a broken engine. It's impossible.

You, on the other hand, you look a lot at and talk a lot about the success side and the data side and how success is often, I don't want to say forgotten, but not treated the same way or as part of the revenue engine. When you look at a broken go-to-market engine, where do you find that founders are typically blind to when it comes to CS? And why is that costing them more than they realize because they're so focused on sales?

Yeah, and going through the conversation we had earlier about when I was doing implementation work, now I am trying to connect through why I always think about CS a lot. And I think it's a mentality back to growth at all costs. "If we get more customers, then we have product-market fit." Like, I think founders and companies, not just founders, validate themselves on ARR, and that's kind of the way they've been measured for such a long period of time from investors, from the market, from your stock price. It's like, "If you're putting more into the top of the funnel and you're making more revenue, then that's where you're being measured," versus "Once I get the client, does the client get value and have value out of what I'm delivering?"

And I think that shift in mindset of, "Are they getting value out of what I'm delivering and will they renew and will they expand?" And because in the past you didn't have to—even if you weren't delivering value, let's talk about any CRM system we've had forever. Like, you're not extracting the most amount of value out of that system, but yet you keep paying that $100,000 bill to Salesforce every year because that's just something you have to do. But that paradigm is completely shifting now. It's like, "If you're not getting value and you're not getting value in like 30, 60, 90 days, you're not getting 12 months." It's like 30 days to get value. So your most important person after the salesperson promises to deliver value is actually deliver the value.

Yeah, probably a good idea. I want to tie that to the Monday morning move for this week. So when we talk about value and we talk about customers, if you've lost a customer in the last six months, which everyone listening has, I want you to go write down the name of that customer that you should have kept. Go into your CRM, go into your notes, trace it backwards. When was the last meaningful—not surface level—when was the last meaningful conversation before the churn notice came? If it's been more than 30 days, you didn't lose them when they left. Go fix that. Go put together a meaningful SOP that really harnesses the power of conversations and uses a forcing lever for your CS team to deeply understand and know your customers.

And I heard Cooper double down on that. So he is very excited about that.

Cooper doubled down on that. All right, let's go into some uncensored questions. Dale, what's something a client has taught you? Not the other way around. What's something a client has taught you?

I will go back right to the origin story that we talked about earlier—that the customer, while may not always be right, they have a point and you need to have a conversation and you need to keep that communication open to make sure that you're aligned. So that was early in my career and has followed me through my whole career.

I love it. What's a belief about GTM that you held five years ago that you've completely abandoned? And why the change of heart? SDRs. I used to believe that every org, no matter what size—SMB, mid-market, enterprise—needed SDRs and that my AE should be focused on closing business and closing business only. I think SDRs, BDRs make sense when the unit economics make sense, but generally speaking, I am gung-ho on full cycle sales reps. Especially with AI now being able to do a lot of the manual prospecting work for them. Listen, they shouldn't be building lists. They shouldn't be digging for phone numbers, but they absolutely should be prospecting.

You've worked with founders, Dale, who are brilliant at building product but genuinely bad at building revenue. Is that fixable? Or is there a version where the answer is you need to hire someone to own this and stay the hell out of the way?

I'm a big believer in leads of genius—identify your leads of genius and finding support. Like, you can't be good at everything. So I'm a big believer in aligning and partnering with people. I was just on a mastermind call yesterday with a brilliant developer, product guy, has an amazing product that he built for music and producers. And I just told him, "I'll give you half an hour. Let's just get on the phone and chat because you've got a great product, but that doesn't mean that he knows how to sell or go to market with it."

And so, you know, I think we need to be more kind and open to people and allow people to live in their lane of genius, share their lane of genius, and then backfill where it's needed.

Love it. So you've been both on the inside of companies where the founder had an actual problem and didn't have the team, didn't have the system. Do you say it out loud? And if so, what do you do? Like, do you tell them, "Hey, you suck"?

Not in those words, but we had a client where the founder was the problem. Like, make no mistake about it. Whether we recommended, whether someone else—like, everything that everyone other than him recommended was wrong. He knew how to fix it, what was going to fix it, whether it be a product issue, a sales issue, a marketing issue—like, he was the problem. I use this term a lot with founders and CEOs. We have a fiduciary responsibility in addition to a moral and ethical responsibility. I look at every company we work for and work with as a company that is ours. You have to say it. You don't say it as you suck, but you have to call out the problem. It is the one and only client we have ever fired because there was a fundamental misalignment. And I can't in good conscience take your money if you're going to combat every single thing. Don't misunderstand me. Like, I don't want a yes person. I want someone who's going to push back. I want someone who's going to encourage different points of view. But to tell everyone they're wrong and just keep blocking, and when you see five, six, seven, eight people leave because of it—I have a fiduciary responsibility to you, to that board, to tell you like you got to get out of the way.

Yeah. Yeah. That's such a good point.

Well, let's keep the tradition alive.

Yeah, we got to keep it alive. I will ask you first. Dream vacation destination?

Australia.

Have you been?

No, I have not been.

All right.

Yeah, it's definitely an African safari for me. We've talked about it before. I want to go play with the lions and the elephants.

All right, y'all. That is time for today. If your GTM is broken, and it probably is, and you can't prove it, you don't know why, you don't know how, and you don't know where to begin, that is exactly why this show exists. Subscribe to GTM Uncensored. New episodes drop every Wednesday. Newsletters drop every Sunday morning. And if you're a CEO, a revenue leader, a founder who's accountable to that number—like, you got to be accountable to that number—this is a show for you. We'll see you next week.