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Inquisitor - Warren Zenna

SUMMARY

What is a Chief Revenue Officer, in general?

In order to create a unified and knowledgeable revenue team, a Chief Revenue Officer is in charge of directing a company's revenue-generating departments, including sales, marketing, and customer success.

What are the chief alignment blind spots that CEOs have in their organizations?

The misuse of the chief revenue officer's position as the "best stressed salesperson in the firm" furthers the misalignment in organizations brought on by salespeople adopting their own terminology, employing different marketing materials, and emphasizing funneling consumers. As a result, CEOs fail to comprehend the CRO's position, which causes more organizational misalignment.

What distinguishes a CRO from a vice president of sales and marketing?

In order to ensure that product, sales, and marketing are informed by customer feedback, a CRO must coordinate sales and marketing efforts with customer success. The company's misalignment problem may not be resolved by the vice president of sales and marketing because of his or her lack of emphasis on customer success.

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00]

Marcus Cauchi: Hello and welcome back to the Inquisitor Podcast with me, Marcus Cauchi. Today my guest is Warren Zenna. He is the founder of the CRO Collective, and I'd really want to explore today what is the CRO, why are they different from the VP of sales or sales and marketing and the interplay between the CRO, the board and the chief executive?

60 seconds on your background

Marcus Cauchi: So Warren, welcome. Thank you, Marcus. Thanks for having me. Excellent. Warren, would you mind giving the audience 60 seconds on your background so they understand why you are qualified to talk on this subject?

Warren Zenna: So, uh, thanks for having me. Appreciate it very much. Uh, I am Warren Zenna, I'm the founder of CRO Collective and I've been in the marketing and sales, I guess, sector since 1994.

It's a pretty long time when dinosaurs still roam the earth, I think. So I have had a unique sort of ex experience in my career where I was a seller for many, many years, and then [00:01:00] I was a sales leader. I ran sales teams, I trained salespeople for many years, and I was always selling marketing services. And as you probably know Marcus, when you're selling the service, you tend to become proficient at that service.

The best salespeople are. So I also became a marketer. I eventually became the product. I became a consultant. I sold marketing services, and then I became a leader at agencies where I was a buyer of marketing services. So all of a sudden now I'm on the other side of the table. And with my perspective of all those years watching people sell to me, I got a whole slew of really interesting data that I was able to ascertain about the marketplace.

And this is where I derived this whole idea behind the CRO Collective.

What is a Chief Revenue Officer?

Marcus Cauchi: Excellent. Okay, so let's start with the key question. What is a Chief Revenue Officer?

Warren Zenna: Okay, that's great. So it really kind of, it strangely depends who you ask, but you're asking me, right? So what a chief revenue officer is, is a leader [00:02:00] who is responsible for aligning and building a revenue team.

So when I say a revenue team, I mean the sales, the marketing, and the customer success organizations all, in my view, roll up to the Chief Revenue Officer and the chief Revenue officer's job is to oversee all the revenue generating components of the business, which are the most customer facing parts of the business, the sales, the marketing, and the customer success.

That's the remit of a Chief Revenue Officer. That's the chief revenue officer's job, is to build a sort of a cohesive team between those three organizations where a sort of a feedback loop occurs. And those three organizations actually are intelligent by virtue of being in a relationship with one another.

The blind spots that many CEOs will have around that alignment

Marcus Cauchi: Excellent. Okay. So let's start out with the blind spots that many CEOs will have around that alignment.

Warren Zenna: Sure. So the reason why I started this business is because from that little anecdote that I shared [00:03:00] earlier, right? My experience of being sold to what I started to notice were a lot of consistent trends that were pretty frustrating.

Mainly I saw symptoms, right? So I saw things like salespeople coming in, well-trained salespeople coming into my office with their software platforms and doing demos. Invariably saw where the salesperson had their own language, but the marketing materials that they showed had a different language, almost even in fact, a different emphasis on different aspects, right?

So it was clear that what happened, understandably, as a salesperson found their own sort of way to talk about the product, which may in fact have been fine, but the marketing materials that they were used to support with were still not aligned with their message. And so, I was literally seeing many times, two different things.

Interestingly, even enough, you've probably experienced a CSL person has a slide on on the, on the wall, and they're saying something that doesn't seem related at [00:04:00] all to that slide. And I knew what was going on, but it created confusion. But what it it communicated to me really was, there's obviously an issue between these departments and the materials that this person is using probably were ones that, you know, he doesn't be stuck with or he didn't generate, or there was no way in which there was influenced them.

That's confusing and it's not good. And another thing I noticed too is how the salespeople very frequently, the way they questioned me and the way that they made the inquiries to me were designed, you could tell, to push me into a funnel, right? They were like leading the witness into a certain cauldron of answers designed, you could tell they wanted to get me into a place where they could be able to go back and put something in their CRM.

It was, it was very much, I was almost like part of like, sort of a. A process as opposed to being sold to. Now, these things are not small because what they indicate to me is that the organization is not aligned properly. And likely what's happening is the chief revenue [00:05:00] officer's role is usually now to sell it or to run the sales department.

I would say I've looked at dozens of chief revenue officer job descriptions on LinkedIn over the last three or four months, and invariably all of them emphasized selling. I don't know how this happened. I don't have any kind of like historical reference point to say why, but over the last four or five years, for some reason, the chief revenue officer has become what I call the best stressed salesperson in the company.

And that misappropriation creates even more problems because as I point out, if there's already misalignment between these organizations, if now I have a chief executive and run ups in front of sales, you could see how that that misalignments are gonna get even more pronounced and even worse. And it does, and CEOs for some reason, don't seem to have a good grasp of exactly what the role of a CRO is and their motivations for hiring them tend to lead them to make big mistakes or put them at risk.

What's the difference between a VP of sales and marketing and a CRO in your mind then briefly?

Marcus Cauchi: What's the difference between a VP of sales and marketing [00:06:00] and a CRO in your mind then briefly?

Warren Zenna: Of VP of sales and marketing? You mean like someone who oversees both sales and marketing? Yeah. You know, I would say that it's an interesting question because I don't really think that there should be a VP of sales and marketing.

There could be, I suspect that that would be someone who might graduate into being a Chief Revenue Officer, and I would say in that scenario, I'd, I'd make this distinction. I'd if a company hired somebody who was to oversee both sales and marketing, I would say that that person clearly would be responsible for making sure that sales and marketing are aligned with each other.

So there's, there's definitely a, a key similarity there. I think maybe what's missing from that role is customer success, which I don't wanna lightly gloss over. It's a very key part of this, and the reason is because I agree is customer success, which is really relatively new, by the way. We call it the account department.

But customer success is really more, as you know, it's onboarding and ensuring customer experience. The [00:07:00] voice of the customer, in my view, is the most important piece of information that a company needs to be getting information from, because that's the customer. So if the customer's having a good or a bad, or a positive or a negative or whatever type of experience, uh, a customer experience, customer insights, should inform product.

They should inform the sales cycle. They should inform marketing, particularly more so these days than ever, because customers today don't wanna be sold to the same way they used to anymore. They wanna be sold to much differently. What what needs to happen today more than ever is a B2B companies need to sort of adapt a better model where they're actually selling to customers in a way that they wanna buy. And the way that you know how customers wanna buy is by listening to them. And the company organizational component or function that's most close to the customer in that regard is the customer success folks who are onboarding them and delivering the product and running them through the cycles.

And [00:08:00] that feedback is critical to know how did our customers buy this product? Why did they not buy this product? What parts of the product are they finding most useful? What, why? Why are they re-upping? Why are they leaving? I think that this is a incredibly, it's ridiculously ignored part of an organization, mainly because B2B companies are obsessed with two things.

They're obsessed with generating revenue as quickly as possible, sales at all costs. And they're also completely obsessed with data and analytics and data and analytics has become almost like the, it's like it's become like a religion in such a way that software companies. I don't know what's your chicken or the egg?

I'm not really sure what it is. I'm not sure whether the thirst for data drove software companies or whether software companies drove the thirst for data. I'm, I'm more on the camp of the software companies are responsible because they're incredibly good at selling. They look at a company like Salesforce or Oracle, the these guys are, these sales forces are incredibly good at what they do.

What [00:09:00] they do is they, they're selling based on KPIs and metrics, and if those KPIs and metrics are born of a misaligned organization, they're gonna make those misalignments even more pronounced. Because now one of the reasons why this misalignment occurs is the silos are created by virtue of each one of these different segments of the organization have their own sort of metrics and goals.

So each one of these organization heads are surviving based on the achievement of those goals, not the achievement of the greater goal, which is what's the customer's success or the customer's experience. So if I've got three organizations all running on what they call MQL and SQLs, these frankly preposterous things that are in the marketplace today, okay?

If I have an MQL that means that my marketing qualified leads are critical for my survival in the organization. Come hell or high water, regardless of the, uh, importance or what they, how they relate to sales qualified leads. So if sales qualified leads are being the mantra for the sales department, [00:10:00] then that sales department is gonna have certain behaviors in the marketplace that are gonna be indicative of that.

This is why I see salespeople out there trying to push people into funnels cuz they're more focused on their marketing KPIs than they are selling to customers. This is a big problem and a good CRO understands how to create revenue KPIs. Where all of the organizations are sort of oring on the same way because they're are there, they're uh, I look at it like a lifeboat, right?

If I'm in a lifeboat with you and three other people, I'm gonna want each of you to use your manpower to like row so that we can get back to shore. I'm not gonna say, well, I'm gonna go faster than you cuz uh, I'm better than you. It would be obviously not, not a good, good, good outcome. So I think everybody sort of has to be having their o or in the water and all have to be pour into this rowing to the same place.

But that's not the way companies are designed these days. And sales is the beast that [00:11:00] eats everything. So anyone that's worked at a B2B company every quarter, there's reckoning about how we're doing on the pipeline and how we're doing on sales. And the quota driven mentality of these companies has salespeople send out these crappy emails to people trying to get people into the funnel that make no sense to customers.

And a chief revenue officer would be the one who would take a look at all these behaviors and understand how they're not working towards that larger goal. And you could see, just to make sense, that if you aligned all this stuff, although all these behaviors would be recalibrated in ways that would probably be more effective.

Marcus Cauchi: Well, I, I think you've touched on several, uh, points that are really important. But what really seems to matter, particularly nowadays, is that we focus on the customer's outcome and the success in the customer's eyes, which will determine whether they renew, whether they expand, whether they get the result that they're looking for, and they're not just sold something and then they find themselves [00:12:00] disappointed and you end up having wasted the opportunity.

Is gonna be determined more by the outcome than the experience itself. And it's also going to be driven by the employee's experience. And that's not just sales or marketing or the customer success team, but the operations people, the, uh, support people. And every touch that the customer has with the customer is going to be experienced in a way that will be colored by the employees experience.

And so I see the CROs role as making sure that not only do you have the alignment within the organization, but the people who are tasked to execute each of those different component, uh, parts of the buyer's journey need to feel like the work they are doing is important. It's meaningful, that they feel like they're contributing, that they have a voice.[00:13:00]

The other side of that, and you mentioned the customer voice, I think is really important, which is that you measure things that matter for the customer, and most metrics are selfish and inward looking, and as a result, you're not listening to the customer. One of the most interesting bits of research that I came across last year was Salesforce's experience, the shift.

And in that they talk about how companies that listen to unhappy customers have a 600% faster product development cycle than customers who don't, uh, than vendors who don't. Now, um, I think one of the challenges is this silo mentality that we see in so many organizations, and I think a lot of that is driven by the history of how businesses have been designed and built at how they're measured their investors.[00:14:00]

Many of you, uh, will have heard me ragging on investors, and I genuinely think that by and large, the investment community is made up as speculators and gamblers who are, have no place in a good business because what they do is they, they're so fixated on their exit. And accountants and finance people have so much power and people are afraid to miss their number, that they focus on hitting their revenue target at the expense of the customer.

And the managers focus on hitting the revenue target at the expense of the salespeople. And marketing is so fixated on the wrong kind of metrics because they, it's all about growth at any cost. Acquire customers so that you can fiddle valuation. So that you can, um, pretend that somehow there's value built into the business.

But at the end of the [00:15:00] day, if you are not building a strong business with strong fundamentals and good foundations with great people who love coming to work and are committed to serving the customer who are compensated and rewarded for their contribution, and you encourage discretionary effort across the entire value chain within the business, then what you're gonna end up with is a bunch of pissed off customers who dump you like a hot brick and they treat you like a commodity cuz you are, you're nothing more. Your thoughts?

Warren Zenna: Agreed. Here's the thing. Right? I understand, Chris, thank you. That the sort of world I'm describing, I, I'm not, I'm not a Pollyanna, you know, I don't, I don't believe that some magical CRO with these magical powers of alignment is gonna come in and all, I mean, the reality is that what I'm doing is I'm also working very closely with CEOs.

To help them create what I'm calling CRO Ready Organizations, which is exactly what you're talking about, which is a CEO whom [00:16:00] is willing, and not all of 'em are honestly, to look at their organizations in the way that you described, right? If you take a step back and say, wait, wait a minute, what kind of a mess have we created here?

Right? So I'm running around like a chicken with my head cut off. I'm, I'm responding to the board. The board is on my, on my, on my ass every day or every week about pipeline and revenues and, you know, m r R and whatever else, other metrics I'm being asked to be measured with. And every hire I make is being evaluated and scrutinized based on those outcomes.

And everyone's running around trying to contribute to these kind of, almost these false metrics that we've created that are really being driven by financial pressure. Financial pressure comes from, like you said, the way in which companies are being funded these days. So here's the problem we're seeing.

The question I'm having when I'm going into companies to work with is, What kind of company is this? This is a company that's mission driven. So I have a founder who really believes very much in the product that they're offering and they can make an impact on customers and they believe that and they want to do that.

And that's the way [00:17:00] that they see growth. Or is it a company who's basically placed a CEO in because they found a guy who they know is a good team member that can get this company evaluated by this point so they can get sold at this point? Companies that are being kind of created for the purposes of a financial product typically are ones that are kind of in a lot of trouble because there's no one in the organization to look at things from a customer-centric perspective cuz it's not a customer-centric company to begin with.

Wasn't built with the idea and place to, to deliver something to a customer. It was designed to get a certain amount of money. Built over a certain quarter by quarter basis, reliably enough that they can get an investment, they can get a sale or they can get another B round. So those types of motivations, those are difficult to break because that's a culture that inherently is not based on delivering good customer experience.

They see it really more as well, if you look at things financially and we deliver a good customer experience, we'll see more revenue as opposed to I care about the customer and I wanna [00:18:00] really make that work. There's, there's, it's, it's a difficult kind of thing to un, un unpack when you start to see this sort of thing.

Marcus Cauchi: But we see this all the time. People who have a good customer experience leave vendors all the time. All the time because they're not focused on the outcome.

Warren Zenna: Right. They're very, very focused on getting sold to, but then they're kind of abandoned once they become customers because the, the job's done. I got you to give me your money so you fulfilled my purpose.

So I don't really kind of care about you as much anymore, as opposed to, you know, I want to nurture lifetime value because I see lifetime value as being the end game for us. There's, there's a different kind of context to culturally for that.

Marcus Cauchi: Right. Okay. So, uh, I had a conversation with my pal, Simon Bowen, who runs a company called Models Method.

Warren Zenna: Mm-hmm.

Marcus Cauchi: And he's one of three of the freshest minds in sales that I know, uh, worldwide.

Warren Zenna: Mm-hmm.

Marcus Cauchi: And he talks about us needing to create bias safety. And what he bases this on is that most vendors [00:19:00] are operating a finite game. It's win or lose.

Warren Zenna: It's gonna have a binary game. Yeah.

The idea is to win the game as opposed to the infinite game

Marcus Cauchi: Absolutely. And the, the idea is to win the game as opposed to the infinite game, which is to keep the game going.

And he made the point. And, uh, you know, we, we, you know, if we are taking this to a macro level in, uh, the west, we are so fixated on winning against China. But what we forget is that China's had an empire of a billion people for 3000 years, and they play this long game. Um, the, uh, the, um, I, I remember, uh, reading an interview with a Chinese premier and he was asked, uh, what was the impact of World War II on China?

He says, well, yeah, it's still to be decided. Now bear in mind this was back in, you know, in the early two thousands. So that, that kind of mindset, that playing the long game, looking [00:20:00] at how we can keep the game going so both sides are benefiting from, it is sadly lacking and I think this is really where CROs can come into their own. Because if they're thinking that infinite game strategy as opposed to the finite game of win lose, then they can let go of those manacles that are holding them back.

Now, I'm not a Pollyanna either. I'm very pragmatic, but the reality is that the model is broken. Sales has become a,

Warren Zenna: It's, it's, it's completely broken. It's almost irrevocably. It has to be re has to be reconfigured, which is sort of what I'm proposing. And the reason why it's to the lens of the Chief Revenue Officer is for two reasons, which we already discussed.

One is Chief Revenue Officers have been misappropriated and mishired over the last three or four years. They've been hired to run sales, which is the, I call that, what I call that, that's called the big mistake. Right? [00:21:00] So a CEO right now listening to this or watching this podcast, who's, and right now thinking about appointing a Chief Revenue officer, I would ask this question and say, what do you want this person to do?

Why do you want to hire a Chief Revenue Officer? Invariably, most CEOs are hiring one because they want to bring in the big gun who could create all this revenue for opportunities for the company, maybe has a bunch of connections or has relationships or whatever, and they're, they're looking at it from a very sales-driven hire.

They want this person to oversee the sales organization. And if you look at, look at any of these job descriptions or even these announcements about CROs, it always says, you know, we're bringing in Bob Stevenson to, you know, drive more revenue and build the company to another a hundred million. I mean, it's all very focused on, on that.

That will be the outcome. That will be the outcome if the CRO is hired properly. But if you're gonna hire a CRO to come in and be a salesperson, ask yourself how misaligned is your organization right now? And actually, there's a methodology to figure it out. And how bad is it gonna [00:22:00] be after this guy comes in?

Think about bringing in a chief executive who's now running sales. This person's gonna be given all sorts of allowances and authorities to run the sales department in the way that he or she sees fit, and it's gonna create even more division in an already broken organization. So I would say that's one thing.

Second thing is, before you, let's say you think I'm correct here, and you go, Hey, you know, Warren, you're making sense. Is your company ready for a CRO? Because it's not enough to just bring in the right person who knows how to do this. It's equally as important that your organization is also prepared for somebody who's going to come in and try to bring alignment to organizational functions that are not, are at war with each other.

So you have to kind of set the company up in a way. That makes sure that that CRO is successful. I would say, given what we've discussed here, that the importance of the Chief Revenue Officer role is the most critical hire that CEO can make, and B, if you don't do it properly, it can be the biggest risk you take.[00:23:00]

And three, your company has to be set up properly in order to make one succeed. And there's a way to do that. It's critically important that you do this. It, it requires a lot more thought. And then to your questions at the beginning of this conversation where, well, how do you relate to the board? What's the way in which you get the board to adopt this mentality?

How do you build the buy-in or the agreement with the rest of your financial organization to understand the importance of this role and how it's gonna make that impact. And this is the part of the whole preparation part that I'm, I'm referring to, and this is a critical thing because this is, I would say this is like an inflection point for a B2B company.

Usually it's around between 25 to 50 million revenues where they're getting complex enough that they need this sort of thing. Cuz they're starting to see those silos created and they're never gonna get past that point with that type of division in the company. And a CRO that comes in with this mentality and this skillset understands how to create this alignment is actually gonna unlock all the [00:24:00] power that that company can bring to the marketplace.

And if it's done properly, that company will probably, could, could double it, double its revenues, but it'll make a lot of really happy customers. Whereas if it doesn't do that, it can actually collapse on itself and it'll happen. Like you and I have had this experience many times. I, I could, I can't count many times where a new platform comes to market.

I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll even say one. What the hell? I'll, I'll be up Zipcar. Okay. I'm a big Zipcar. I was a, one of the first users of Zipcar. When Zipcar came out I got the app almost, I think it was the year it came out. I've been using Zipcars since 2004. I think it's, when I first got Zipcar, I was just incredible.

I was so happy with this, like the level of way in which I was taking care of it. The app worked and the way I could call people on the phone and I mean, it was just a really great experience. And of course over time what happened is they had to start outsourcing a lot of the customer experience stuff because it became expensive, right?

Customer service centers are, are costly. They should be because they're important, right? But that's where the bean counters kind of wanna start to chip away right at things. And all of a [00:25:00] sudden I found myself unable to get things resolved. The app didn't work as well. The product itself just became, over time really disappointing.

And I could feel it. I could literally feel the way over time as the company got bigger. They didn't really have in place a way to take care of the customer at scale. And the customer lost, like, in my view, the customer should have been the thing that they kept happy, but other things fall apart before that.

But I felt that, and uh, this is a common thing and I think this is where A CRO can come in that understands these types of dynamics and can organize the company in a way that doesn't let go, like you said, of the long game and focuses more on that long game and less on that short game. That feels good.

It feels good every quarter to get those revenues. It feels good every quarter to get that pipeline filled up, but it's a very empty result because it really doesn't win you in the long game. [00:26:00] And I think that this is where I think CEOs kinda start to think about this role differently and how important it is, and how they hire the person properly.

So I appreciate the indulging me in that long answer.

Marcus Cauchi: I think there's something really important in your answer, which is that companies start out with great intent, I think. So then they start to operationalize. Yes. And particularly when, uh, funding comes in. So when they go out to VC or private equity, they operationalize.

And so what was once great then suddenly starts having the corners cut off it and you downsize your people and you start saving money here and there. And so the overall experience n uh, is devalued, but the outcomes that customers originally came to you start becoming diminished. And so what happens is we then, black people would be a great example [00:27:00] of this.

In, uh, their early days they had this, uh, device. It was kind of funky. You could do email and everything else. But their CEO at the time said, we're not going to put a camera on our phone. And it didn't adapt. And you saw this with Nokia. They invented the smartphone, but they were holding onto what made them successful because they couldn't let go.

And we see attachment being a key issue here.

Warren Zenna: Mm-hmm.

Marcus Cauchi: Uh, so we see all these different forces at work. And the CRO I think needs to be the champion of the customer. And they really need to pay attention. They need to listen to the customer, and they need to listen to people who are on the front lines speaking to you, dealing with the customer.

Because I think one of the most innovative bits of tech that has come around recently is. Company called [00:28:00] Authentics. And they are, uh, an AI that sits on call centers in the US health system. And they listen to and analyze the raw unfiltered conversations that customers are having with the course center agents and how the company is helping them, how the companies are getting in the way.

Often the information that we get from those conversations is then denied by these senior executives

Marcus Cauchi: The problem is that often the information that we get from those conversations is then denied by these senior executives. And I, I remember hearing a story. Customers love this, that and the other, and they hated flip. Its fla, its and flop. Its, but there was no way that you should launch this particular product.

And instead the CEO says, well, we've invested a load of money on this. Uh, I'm gonna ignore the data. I'm making a captain's call, and they lost 400 million dollars.

Warren Zenna: It happens hell all the time. All the time.

People do not put the customer at the heart of everything that they do

[00:29:00]

Marcus Cauchi: Absolutely. You see this consistently because people do not put the customer at the heart of everything that they do, and that I see as the CROs.

Warren Zenna: I agree. I think I should. The best CROs in my view are ones whom have the competencies of selling and competencies of understanding marketing, but more importantly, come at the job from a customer-centric perspective. So if I was being brought into a company as a CRO, uh, not only would I want to take a look at the way sales is going to market, I'd look at their compensation plans, what motivates the salespeople.

I'd look at the marketing, messaging and the KPIs, but I'd, most importantly, I'd look and see like, how do those two things relate to the way the product is delivered to customers and the way customers are buying and the way customers are not buying, and why customers are leaving. Why customers up upgrade, or why are they going?

Like, that's the, that's the gold that should be informing all those other things. And I think I, I had [00:30:00] this conversation cause I have clients I'm speaking to every day. I was coaching a a a a CEO last week and his conundrum and all his issues were very focused on managing how to measure all these different things within his different departments.

And the entire conversation was going on and on about this sort of spaghetti junction that this person created in his company to manage outcomes. And I asked him, I said, where's the customer in all? Like all the problems that we're focusing on, for all, all due respect, have very much to do with yourselves.

It's very self-indulgent problems that you created. You built all these software systems and KPIs, but how much of these things actually relate to the way that customers are buying or not buying your products? You know, it sort of threw 'em off a little bit. We had to have a long conversation about it, but, you know, it's surprising how these types of, uh, indulgences and distractions become the, the business.

I mean, I've had meetings, you've had meetings where all, all people do all the entire meetings, talk about outcomes and metrics and [00:31:00] data and data points, and how to better, you know, I need to use, uh, I, I don't wanna, I don't wanna use Salesforce anymore. You know, I, and, and I want to use, uh, uh, I'm trying to think of, there's a whole bunch of other different ways in which you can measure, measure data these days.

But, uh, there's more conversations around software and I, I have a real issue with the software industry cause of this. Is the obsession that people have with new toys and new ways to measure. Because first of all, software platforms are in inordinately expensive, and they're long-term contracts and they also require a lot of maintenance and they also require a lot of specialized people to run them.

So what ends up happening now is I, if I've invested a lot of money into a software platform, now my ass is on the line. I wanna make sure that software platform works. So I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put a lot of people on that to make sure that it works. And now what I've done is I've actually created a distraction around the existence of software.

So I opposed to understanding how that software actually relates to my bigger, what you and I talk about that long game, I don't think that [00:32:00] that happens enough. And I do believe that these interfaces and these UIs that people sell, they look really great and they're very hypnotic. But the reality is that, uh, I think that they need to, uh, exact, I think we call the software conundrum, right?

Is that there's a, there's a really critical part of the way that people are obsessed with new software platforms and software platforms create silos. Because remember, there's only a certain number of people that know how to use Salesforce. Everyone runs Salesforce guy all, all the time, right?

Marcus Cauchi: This then speaks to three critical issues.

First of all, you need to understand the customer's journey from the customer's perspective. Now, my pal, Bob Nester, has defined one of the most elegant descriptions of the customer journey. The customer journey starts in this zone [00:33:00] where they are curious and they're investigating stuff, but they kind of, they make space for it and they look passively.

Then they move from that zone of investigation to this zone of temptation. And that's where they start to look actively. And then they start to bring together all these different vendors and they make trade offs, and then they make the decision to buy by what they've excluded. But the smart salesperson understands that what they need to be able to do is describe in simple terms, in ways that they can visualize what that better future looks like, what the outcome will look like, and how it's possible.

Because you can either go towards that better future, you can poodle along with you are at the moment and stick with the status quo. But more often than not, what happens is things will [00:34:00] get worse over time. So the salesperson needs to partner or the se, the vendor organization with the salesperson as the conductor of the orchestra needs to partner with the customer.

In order to co-create a solution that will deliver superior outcomes for the customer. At the same time, you need to take into consideration the internal customer experience. You need to make sure that the different silos and barriers are removed so that you can accelerate the development of the right product, the development of the right service, so that you can deliver the outcomes that the customers want.

And you need to make sure that all these different areas of the business own their peace, but they're working towards common purpose, which is to deliver that buyer safety. Cuz all purchases [00:35:00] are effectively an insurance purchase.

Warren Zenna: Mm-hmm.

Marcus Cauchi: Your insurance gains worst future. And what you're doing is you're renting that outcome for as long as it's delivering, uh, the result that you want.

But what you need to make sure is that you are creating collaboration, you are encouraging discretionary effort. And this is why the internal employee experience is so key. Because if you got pissed off employees, they're gonna deliver a substandard service. The customer is gonna feel, uh, the pinch on it and they're gonna leave.

So if you don't make sure that all of those different threads are running in parallel and that you are taking care to understand that you have external customers, but you have internal customers as well.

If you have a misaligned organization, you're gonna lose people.

Warren Zenna: No, certainly. Yeah, you're right cuz I, one thing I also, um, emphasize with this whole thing is if you have a misaligned organ, you're, you're a hundred percent right Marcus.

If you have a [00:36:00] misaligned organization, you're gonna lose people. People leave those kind of companies. I hate working. I, we've all had this experience working at a company where, you know, the, the sales department can't stand the marketing department and you always feel like you're being sort of attacked or you're in this contentious mode all the time and you can't get anything done.

These are not environments where customers are gonna be focused on at all. So another outcome of a really good CRO is retention of good people. People wanna work at these places.

Marcus Cauchi: Absolutely.

Warren Zenna: And I'd say that's even a bigger cost, right? Because I mean, if I have people I've invested in, I've trained and I've developed, and they all leave me replacing them as expensive and as difficult.

And then what also happens is today, as you know, you know, it's not like a secret when someone leaves a company, they post you know, stuff on social media about how shitty the company is, and it gets a bad reputation. No one wants to work there anymore. Or simply, if I'm about to interview for a job at a company in a relatively senior position, I'm gonna reach out to four or five people I know that worked there before, and they're gonna say to me, oh my [00:37:00] God, don't go near that place.

It's a war zone, right? So I'm gonna be less inclined to wanna interview there. What you want is you want people to stay because they feel like they're being, like you said, they're being valued, that marketing feels, that they understand the ways in which their contributions actually resulted in the sale, and they're being rewarded for it.

And they also wanna know if the salespeople aren't being whipped in the back with some wet rope to run out there and just try and drive, you know, a pipeline every, every month, but they're actually being told how to service customers properly and they're being rewarded for that. These are the kind of companies that people stay at.

These are the kind of companies that people are really excited about coming into work every day. Cause they feel like they're part of a team and that what they do gets is valued and they work well with people. And, uh, to me, I think this is actually probably almost the easiest sell, is that when they speak to a CEO, it's like, are your people happy? Like Wolf

why do you think they're not? You know what, what's the political environment of the organization? Are people at war with each other? You, you, these are really important things.

They don't recognize the critical importance of their people

Marcus Cauchi: Yeah. You've got to make yourselves a [00:38:00] destination employer somewhere where people want to come to work. And in fact, Google had project oxygen.

And the number one, the number one factor that determined whether a manager was effective was whether the people in the team invited people they cared about to join the team. And the problem is that so often people are failing in that. And they don't recognize the critical importance of their people.

Warren Zenna: Mm-hmm. I agree.

Marcus Cauchi: They don't recognize the critical value. And as a result, what you see is all these folks churning and burning sales teams, and then it creates a culture of blame, excuses, upward delegation. Middle managers are squeezed and the CRO needs to be [00:39:00] the one that says, enough, this is no longer acceptable.

And they have to have the courage and they also have to have the strength and the weight to be able to stand up to the board and stand up to the investors and say, no, you're gonna need to slow down. Yes, it might affect the short term revenue, uh, number, but if you want to keep the business and not implode, then you're gonna have to slow down.

You're gonna need to do these things. But that takes someone of enormous courage and someone who doesn't give a damn whether people like him.

Warren Zenna: That's right. And uh,

Marcus Cauchi: And that's a tough one.

Warren Zenna: It's such a, such a key thing. So when I talk about onboarding a Chief Revenue Officer, that's why I refer earlier to this CRO readiness program because the CEO needs to be, I guess, emotionally intelligent enough to understand that if this C CEO is gonna bring on a CRO in the manner that you and I are [00:40:00] discussing right now, that is gonna have reverberations across organizations that are here too far, kind of pro self-protecting themselves.

If I'm gonna bring in a CRO, who's gonna become someone who's a unifier, unification doesn't happen by sprinkling, unification, dust over everybody's coffee. It happens through a lot of work. And so what has to happen is they have to, if, if I'm a CRO, aside from the quality you just mentioned, which you're a hundred percent right, you have to be someone who has a great deal of courage, self-confidence, and frankly also tools and knowledge and processes in place, which is what I'm providing them to know what to do, that you also most importantly need to understand and know that their boss has their back.

So if I'm gonna be interviewing as a, as a CRO to a, to a, to a company, there's a lot of ways I actually walk through this. In my, in my course is, is how to, how to actually set yourself up for success in the job. And the key thing, first of all, is A, is first make sure that you and your future CEO are on the same page about what the job really is.[00:41:00]

You're in agreement that we're what it is that I'm gonna be doing, and that you agree with that and that that's what you want, right? So now we're already aligned on the mission of this job. And the second thing is to understand like what allowances authorities do I have to do my job? And secondarily is, are you Mr. CEO in agreement with the timeline that I have to get these things accomplished and do I have your support? Right? So as you know, this happens, right? I get hired, there's a lot of other steps. I'm not, I'm kind of jumping ahead in some respects, if the CEO has to set the company up in a way with a lot of other things.

But the company has been sort of, as you could say, prepared or tenderized as it were, right? For the injection of this new consciousness that's gonna come into the organization. And when the CRO comes in and he starts to have conversations with these various departments who are at war with each other, there's already some expectation and some understanding of what they're gonna, it's not a surprise.

Right? And he already also knows where the bodies are [00:42:00] buried, so to speak. So for example, good CEO would say to the, to this new CRO, you know, look, Steven's probably gonna be very excited about this. He'll be very cooperative. However, you know, Bob is, is, is gonna hate your guts. He's gonna be very upset about this.

Right? And these are things that I need to understand so that I know the psychology of these things, of how to manage these things. Because ultimately what's gonna happen is in order for me to wrangle together a aligned organization, I'm gonna need third party data that everybody agrees on, that no one can deny is a reality.

So you have to expose the problem. So everyone's staring at it and they can't do anything about it. But the key thing is, I know as the new CRO, and this is a critical part of this, is that if I'm speaking to Bob in this example, I just laid out and Bob is being contentious and I know. Based on my understanding of Bob, that he's probably gonna get up from this meeting and walk into the CEO's office afterwards and complaint to him that I have absolutely no question that the CEO is gonna say, Bob, I hired Steve.

I trust him, and I ask you to listen to it [00:43:00] every says. And if you know that that's gonna happen, you're gonna have. That confidence that you just described, because I know that my chief executive has already convinced the board and has my back and he understands the pain that we're gonna have to go through.

But that on the other side of it, is gonna be something much better. And I think the problem with CROs that get hired is they don't have that buy-in. What happens to CROs is they get hired even in a way that I just described, and they quickly find themselves the worst enemy in the entire organization.

They're just trying to do something that makes sense, but nobody agrees with them. Nobody wants to do this, and the boss doesn't have their back. And then three or four months into the job they're saying, what the hell did I get myself into? And those are usually my, my customers. Those are the C CROs that come to me and say, look, I don't know what I got myself into.

Maybe you can help me get out of the situation and I can give 'em a roadmap to kind of work themselves into a way in which to be successful there. So I think there's probably a lot of CROs who are listening to this right now that are either a asking themselves, you know, I'm just ahead of sales. [00:44:00] The CRO title I have is meaningless cuz all I'm really doing is running the sales department and, you know, that's really kind of either A, that's what I wanted, which means I'm really not a CRO, I'm the head of sales.

I'll take the title, but I'm, I'm not really what, what, what I've, I'm not really doing what I should or they're saying. I really wanted to be a chief revenue officer in the way that I'm hearing here. I really wanted to be someone who had a much larger remit, but I'm not being allowed to, and I'm finding that the organization hasn't been set up for me to succeed in that respect.

And I'm really not happy, and I, I'm really looking to leave. I'm honest with you. I'd say I'm disappointed with this decision. I feel sort of in a contentious environment. And if I knew what I knew now, I probably would've asked a lot of different questions. I might not have taken this job in the first place.

What do I do about this? How do I get myself out of this situation and turn it into something where I win and the company wins? And I understand that, and I, I do have a lot of ways in which I can help someone like that kind of figure out how to work themselves into a better situation. And the CEO is looking at this guy and saying, I thought I brought in this wizard.

[00:45:00] Who's gonna come in and do all this stuff? What's going on? I'm really disappointed because my expectations, as you can understand, Marcus, were not really realistic or they weren't in sync with what the expectations were of the person I hired. And so that CEO needs to take some responsibility in that and understand, oh, I probably hired improperly.

I really didn't think through what the job really was. And so my disappointment isn't in the person, it's in the manner in which I approach the role and I need to recalibrate that. So these are the kind of things that I'm trying to fix so that you and I have this sort of, uh, vision where companies have a cultural setup, where all the things that we're discussing are possible and then maybe we can have some better experiences in the marketplace.

So that's kinda like the overall idea here. So I appreciate you kind of, kind of setting that up.

Marcus Cauchi: Well, this again feeds into something else that's really important as well, which is that once the CRO has established that contract with the board and with the CEO, they then also need to [00:46:00] have the backs of their managers.

And the managers have to have the backs of their salespeople. Yep, exactly. But again, this is driven by, or the, the negative side of this is driven by the wrong people having power in so many organizations. Just because they have money does not mean they know how to grow an effective business.

Warren Zenna: That's true.

Marcus Cauchi: Just because they have the position doesn't necessarily mean they understand human beings because the people who, uh, reach the top often the ones that play the political game rather well. I dunno if you've ever read a book called Snakes in Suits by Robert Babiak and Bob Hare, and it's all about corporate psychopathy. On death row, 3% of inmates have clinical psychopathy.

5% of the US boardroom are clinically [00:47:00] psychopathic. Now this is really telling, because what that does is it creates a culture where people are a thing. They're not human beings. And, and one of the, the frustrations that I have is that so many organizations are run as a, a machine instead of understanding that these are the lives of human beings that are at stake here, the livelihoods of people, and they have to be aware of all of this, and they have to pay heed to it so that people want to come to work, they give their best work, they give discretionary effort, they collaborate, they roll up their sleeves, and when times are tough, they chip in.

But if you haven't created that culture, then what you're gonna end up with is a bunch of people fleeing the sinking ship. Because eventually it will happen. And I've seen this happen time and time again where you [00:48:00] end up with a company that grows through exponential hypergrowth and then they fall off the cliff because the fundamentals were not there because the culture wasn't there.

Because people do not do trust or have faith in the business. They not all marching to the same team because there isn't that alignment and mission and purpose are absolutely central to all of this. Mission is the outcome that we want and purpose is how we get there. And the problem is that far too often, neither of those things are discussed.

We've created a shiny knee widget, let's go out and make some money from it.

Warren Zenna: They are discussed. I mean, you've been in situations, Marcus, where you walk into a company and they have the mission and everything are written on the walls, right? They're really very, uh, deliberate about making sure everyone sees all this language and stuff, but the company isn't run in accordance with that stuff.

So it feels like this kind of hypocritical environment where everyone's talking about. Facebook's probably a good example of that. You know, [00:49:00] I've been there, I mean, all over the walls, all this stuff about this and that and the other thing, but the places not run that way. And I think that a lot of people see this sort of thing, and I, I think you're right.

Yeah. I think that, um, all too often salespeople in particular feel like cannon fodder. They're given their munitions, right? They're given their, their canteen and some food, and they're being sent out to the field with a weapon and a couple of bullets, and they're like, all right, get out there. And if you come back all chopped up, they just say, all right, they just threw out a new one.

And I think that this is a problem, particularly when a, you know, a, a commission is hung in my face as being the thing I'm gonna end up with, right? So you're gonna double, I I'll pay you this salary and you'll double it in your commissions. I don't know how many salespeople end. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's fine.

What I wanna just conclude with is the critical importance of not only the customer centricity part of it, which we were talking about, but also the health of your organization and how the CRO, the critical component of this role [00:50:00] is alignment and alignment's a big word. It's not just taking things and putting 'em in order.

It's creating cohesion, cultural cohesion, right? That's based on customers values, feedback. And it includes, there's, there's values, there's also, uh, communication strategies where people listen to each other. There's a lot of sharing of information, collaboration, right? So if I know that, uh, the marketing department and the sales department are really in close arms with each other, you're probably gonna see really, really great marketing materials that the salespeople are gonna use because they're gonna be driven by insights. And they're gonna be built collaboratively, right? Whenever I make marketing materials, which I do a lot, now, I ask the salespeople to look them over because they're the ones out there selling. And they'll say, no, no, no, no. This is not the right way to talk about this. This, I don't, the engineers came up with this.

This is not at all the way we should be talking about this, because the customers don't understand this. And that's really, it's important, you know? So I think this is a critical thing to [00:51:00] understand about the CRO role.

What type of persons running the company?

Marcus Cauchi: I saw a really telling statistic tail end of last year, which said that 40% of call center tickets erased because engineers build products.

Warren Zenna: That's right. That's a great qu. I love that quote. It's so true. Now, I mean, engineers tend to be a lot of founders and founders who are engineers, aside from being ridiculously brilliant, they're very pragmatic and they're not very, you know, they're not good with their I the eq, you know, and so you could tell when an engineer is doing a demo or a salesperson is doing a demo, and there's a lot of human aspects to a sales good salesperson doing a demo who really understands the way customers need the thing, as opposed to an engineer who's just, you know, in love with his, his code.

You know? And I think it's a really critical thing too, is that when, when I meet a CEO or a founder who's an engineer, it's kind of harder to get them to understand these ideas because of the way that their brains are, are designed. So there's, that's another part of this whole thing too, is like, [00:52:00] who is running the company?

What type of persons running the company? The best CEOs, as we all know, are the ones who are really human and really good at understanding people and really have like real true leadership skills as opposed to just being really good at building great products, which is important, right? But those tend not to lend themselves well to being leaders.

We see too many instances of this. So there's a lot of factors that get in the way of my ability to be able to implement the medicine that I'm proposing. But I understand the environment enough to know that all the things that you and I are referencing here are real, they're not imagined, they're measurable.

I can get, you know, I haven't had one CEO or CRO who I've spoken to tell me that I'm wrong or that I'm off base or what I'm trying to do doesn't make any sense. Matter of fact, what I'm hearing mostly is thank God, is it working? You know, how's it going? Right? There's just sort of this hopefulness of maybe this, this sort of reset within this customer service organization or this, uh, revenue organization will be done.

And you know, the Rev [00:53:00] Ops people are loving this. Look at all these Rev Ops people who I speak to, they're brilliant. Some of these Rev Ops people, Rev Ops people are like almost. Those are incredibly sharp shepherds that can like corral a million sheep, right? I mean, Rev Ops people are amazing. They know how to like get a whole bunch of things to wrangle together, but they're not in a position of executive power to do it at the cultural level.

They're just doing it really more on an operational level. So if I look at the proper organizational structure for a chief revenue officer, he or she should have head of sales, head of marketing, head of customer success, and some head of Rev Ops, maybe even Ad Ops all rolling up into him or her to oversee how those organizations work together and that that set up that type of organizational structure is one that has really set up to succeed.

I tell you one problem I see having a lot as a CRO takes the job, wants to wrangle in all these things, but somebody is already appointed a chief marketing officer. That's where there's a lot of issues, right? What is it that you do with, uh, [00:54:00] a Chief Marketing Officer who has a C level re position in one of those roles and now theoretically should report up to a Chief Revenue Officer. That's a difficult one to manage. And this is one that I run into a lot and I don't really have like some kind of magical answer, but it's definitely a bottleneck because if I'm a CMO and I've worked really hard to get that title, how quickly or easily am I going to want to suddenly report into a newly input Chief Revenue Officer?

And what's the relationship that a CMO and a CRO should have? And this is, this is actually, I had a big argument about this online a couple days ago, kind of got a little contentious because some people feel that the best CROs would be marketing people, and some people feel the best CROs would be salespeople.

And there's really no formula for this. I'd be curious to know what your thoughts are on that.

Marcus Cauchi: Personally, I think you need someone who has the business's best interests at heart and is an outstanding customer advocate. And it is really good [00:55:00] at creating teams understands true strategy, not complex. What they're very good at is narrow and deep.

They know how to say no to things. They know that it's important that they admit when they don't know stuff. So they surround themselves with great people. They are people who spend an inordinate amount of time coaching their direct reports and cascading coaching through the organization. They insist that anyone who touches or impacts the customers spends time speaking to customers and listening to customers, cuz marketing almost never does, which is just crazy.

They need to be someone who is organizationally strong enough or has a good number. Two, uh, who's good at the organizational operational. Systems [00:56:00] piece and can see the big picture and then can take the fight to the board and where they come from, frankly, not really, don't really care.

Warren Zenna: That's interesting. It's interesting you say that.

Marcus Cauchi: Would be, that they need to come from a strong customer success point of view.

Warren Zenna: Hmm. It's interesting. I, I, I, I see that.

Marcus Cauchi: I, I think customer success is a better reason.

Warren Zenna: Okay. Interesting.

Marcus Cauchi: Sorry, go ahead.

Warren Zenna: Uh , no, no, it's okay. I, I, I think that's an interesting perspective. I, I just don't see, as you probably can imagine, I don't see a lot of customer success, people going out for CRO jobs, and very rarely do they, and most of the time, I'd say 95% of people whom have CRO in their future are salespeople.

Right. Because this is like, kinda like, I think the way the industry is,

Marcus Cauchi: Cause they're the loudest.

Warren Zenna: That's exactly right. That the, the industry has sort of created this pathway for them. Matter of fact, all my students are calling students as terrible participants or course members are all salespeople.

Marcus Cauchi: In fact, I have a better route. And I think it should be the Channel Chief. [00:57:00]

Warren Zenna: Explain. Chief.

Marcus Cauchi: Channel chief. A channel manager. Well, a channel manager is closer to a general manager than they are to a sales manager and a chan. A good channel chief is closer in profile to a chief executive than they are to, uh, a VP of sales or a VP of marketing.

And if you are really effective at growing a channel, so the selling through third parties where you have no direct control, no higher fire, you don't determine their internal comp plan, you need to be a fantastic collaborator. And the best, uh, you know, the, the, your success in the future is undoubtedly going to be determined by your ability to collaborate.

And if we look at the software industry, virtually every software vendor is just one wheel in the machine. They're a cog. So if you produce a, uh, a cybersecurity product, you are one part of a stack that might have 12 to 20 different parts, [00:58:00] which is in turn part of the overall IT strategy, uh, which might have a hundred different parts.

Uh, and it is there to help enable the board's vision. Now, if you c don't understand that, you need to co-sell that, sometimes you need to partner with your competition. Sometimes you need to take a step back and say, you know, go with our competitor. So I think that the, the best sales leaders, sorry, the best business leaders will come from collaborative environments in the future.

Warren Zenna: I agree. It's no longer you, you, here's what I would say, and I agree with you, that that is a critical quality. If A CRO oversees sales, marketing, customer success, which we agree they would. It's my view that based on my experience, sales organizations, [00:59:00] sales people are the most difficult to manage. It's a very unique, sort of nuanced group of people, right?

And even what the sales process is, it's, it, it's sort of a, it sort of has its own animal, you know, plus all the, the emphasis and focus that is applied to a sales organization within a company. There's so much focus and emphasis on it. A CRO who does not have a strong sales background, would have a difficult time getting the sales organization to buy into their leadership without that, it's almost like the army in a way, right?

So if I go and I'm running a sales organization, I don't have stripes on my, on my shoulder that say that I've been in battle. Like you, it's very hard to get a sales organization to respond to me and accept me and respect me the the best.

Marcus Cauchi: The best channel people will have been out there, and they are, they understand sales.

They've carried a quota. In fact, more often than not, if you're carrying a channel quota, you're carrying, um, one that [01:00:00] where the decimal point has moved to the right. So, uh, you're carrying, you know, 10 million or a hundred million and, uh, you need to be able to coordinate all of those things and you have to co-sell with your partners.

So they will come with that. And I absolutely agree, you, you, uh, you do need to have that pedigree, but you don't necessarily need to be somebody who sells today. I think you

Warren Zenna: I agree with that. I, I, I agree with that. I think it's almost like the basketball coaches, right. Particularly the best basketball coaches played a long, long time ago, and they weren't that great.

Marcus Cauchi: Yeah.

Warren Zenna: But they're excellent coaches and they know how to run teams. I think there's a similar sort of thing here. I don't know if you need, matter of fact, I think the best possible salespeople ever tend to make really bad managers because they're better off selling, right? That's their skillset. So I think there is a balance there.

But, um,

What first bit of advice would you give him that, you know, he would've probably ignored?

Marcus Cauchi: Warren, we've come to the, uh, end, end of our time together. [01:01:00] Before we go, one question. If you had a golden ticket and you could go back and advise your 23 year old idiot self, what first bit of advice would you give him that, you know, he would've probably ignored ?

Warren Zenna: Great question. I probably say I should listen more. When I was younger, I was very typically, you know, kind of thought that I had the answers or I had to learn things myself. I had this idea, I think, in my head that I had to make all these mistakes or I had to do it on my own. Whereas there was a lot of wisdom around me when I was younger and if I was a better mentee is the right word. Right?

Marcus Cauchi: Yeah.

Warren Zenna: I probably would've jumped a lot of steps that I needed to take to evolve to the place that I am today. When I, when I speak to young people today, my, you know, former self, the first thing I say is, Hey, listen, if people have been down the road, you're going listen to them because they've gone there already.

And the second thing is, [01:02:00] if someone's doing, if someone's doing something that you wanna do, then do what they're doing. You know? And I kind of didn't really

Marcus Cauchi: Find people whose history is your future.

Warren Zenna: Exactly.

Marcus Cauchi: That's what I would tell fi find people whose history is your future and learn from them.

Warren Zenna: And learn from them.

Marcus Cauchi: And Warren, how can people get a hold of you?

Warren Zenna: So you can go to my site, which is www.thecrocollective.com, or you can reach me by email at warren@thecrocollective.com, or you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm the only Warren's Zenna on the world, so I'm easy find.

Marcus Cauchi: Excellent Warren Zenna, thank you.

Warren Zenna: Marcus, thank you so much.

Marcus Cauchi: This is Marcus Cauchi signing off once again from the Inquisitor Podcast. If you found this useful and insightful, then please like, comment, share, and subscribe. And if you'd like to get in touch with me, my email is marcus@laughs-last.com. Now, many people have been asking me, what do you do, Marcus? Well, what I do is I take companies that are looking to scale and achieve hyper growth [01:03:00] without loss of control.

They want to achieve growth rates of 200% compound year on year. They want to become a destination employer and they want to create lifetime customers, and they wanna make sure that those customers get the outcomes that they want and they deserve. If that's the kind of organization you want to become, then do get in touch.

And in the meantime, stay safe and happy selling. Bye-bye.

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