Ep. 143 - Is the CRO the Key to Aligning Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success?

Guest: Warren Zenna, Founder of The CRO Collective 

Scaling a SaaS company is no walk in the park. 

At a certain point, operational complexity demands more than just growth—it demands cross-functional alignment. Enter the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO).

In this episode, we dive into the evolving role of the CRO with expert Warren Zenna, founder of The CRO Collective and Zenna Consulting Group, and host of the CRO Spotlight podcast.

Warren unpacks why misalignment between Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success persists—and how the CRO may be uniquely positioned to fix it.

Key insights you'll gain:

• What it means for a SaaS company to be “CRO-ready”
• Why scaling companies make the same costly mistakes—and how to avoid them
• Practical tips for CROs, CMOs, and CEOs to align teams and drive revenue growth

Other resources to check out:

Interview with Vinay Bhagat, Founder and CEO of TrustRadius who publishes a yearly report about how B2B buyer behavior is changing.

The Lead Gen Mistake I Guarantee You’re Making – how to create content that better identifies intent from today’s b2b buyer.

And, if you want an outside look at your content with actionable advice, take advantage of our Content Audit. Valued at $20K in free consulting

---

Thanks for listening to the SaaS Backwards Podcast, brought to you by Austin Lawrence Group. We help SaaS firms reduce churn, accelerate sales, and generate demand. Learn more at AustinLawrence.com.

---

Is your messaging a sales ally or sneaky saboteur? Let us help with our free messaging audit.

We’ll look at your website’s messaging, content, and conversion potential from the eyes of today’s buyer and deliver a presentation with new combinations to more sales conversations and demos.

And the best part? It’s absolutely free.

Get started today!

Transcript

0:25

Welcome to SaaS Backwards, a podcast that helps SaaS CEOs, CROs, and CMOs to accelerate growth and enhance profitability. Our guest today is Warren Zenna, founder of the CRO Collective, host of the CRO Spotlight podcast, and also founder of Zenna Consulting Group. All of these are focused on ensuring the success of CROs and the CEOs they work with. Warren, welcome to Thank you very much, Ken. I really appreciate inviting me and Me too. You know, so much of what we're doing these days is focused on the office of the CRO. So I think this conversation is going to be really important and valuable for our listeners and for us as well. But before we get started, could you tell us a little bit more about yourself and how you came Sure thing. So I guess I'm a salesman at heart. I started selling when I was really young. I just got lucky. A friend of mine who I'm so close with, almost 30 years later, dragged me out from behind a bar and said, you could probably sell anything. And I guess he was right. So he gave me a career and he was in media. So I just jumped into that space. It wasn't a choice. I was just selling media. Back then it was like newspaper advertising, it evolved. So I was selling marketing services for no number of years. And I got really into that space, the marketing services space, the marketing technology space, which it evolved into. It used to be just like sort of a creative service and it became this technological innovation. It's kind of interesting, right? And so I got lucky in that space, the marketing advertising space became a really focal point for a lot of innovations in other businesses. So you had search engine marketing, and social media marketing, and you had mobile marketing, and now you have AI. So it was really just amazing how my career started right at the beginning of these things, even the beginning of the internet, frankly. And as I rose in the ranks, I sort of really became more of a consultant. I became a marketing consultant and a sales consultant. So I was getting kind of moved up through the ranks. I opened up my own agency, marketing agency, about 20 years ago called Zenna Consulting Group. You referenced it. And then I became an executive at two holding companies. I was an executive at the Publicis Group, and then I was an executive at Havas. And in both those organizations, I got a much more thorough understanding of large, complex businesses, as well as the ad tech startup community, which was really prolific back there. And this is where I started to formulate my ideas around startups in the SaaS industry. I was an advisor to a lot of these companies. They were selling to me because I became a buyer through my executive roles. And I started to kind of formulate a lot of understanding about the way sales and marketing work together because I'm a practitioner of both. And then I also saw how customer success was working because I became a customer. And I just sort of came to this realization. I don't know if it was some sort of epiphany, but it was just a gradual understanding that The model is broken. There's a big disconnect between these functions. Marketing, sales, customer success tend to be living in different worlds. There's this pervasive disconnect and misalignment between these three. It doesn't seem to be anybody that's really responsible for bringing them together. In fact, it seems companies at least at that time were almost designed to keep them apart, right? In fact, one of the organizations I worked for, this is an interesting story, I brought this to his attention in like 2016 and I said, look, you got this situation where we're all fighting with each other here. There's no collaboration and we're sort of incentivized to. And this executive who was in Europe said, yes, It's done by design. And I was like, what are you, nuts? I said, why? He goes, competition's good. Little internal competition's good. I thought, this guy's nuts. Like, this guy's a moron. It was incredible to me. He thought. And it was really more like, to think about it, like this particular person, whom I won't mention, had this notion that by keeping everybody competing with each other, kind of fulfilled a lot of needs for this person, right? It kept everybody in the dark. It enabled them to make up interpretations about a lot of things, which was good. They didn't have to be clear about things. Ambiguity was good for them. It was insane. But that's the case with a lot of companies. And so I started thinking like, why is this chief revenue officer role focused on sales only? I know the answer, but we can get into that. But at the time I was wondering that question and it occurred to me that this role, this chief revenue officer role is probably the place to start from having that person really be the one to overseas the revenue operation. I sort of made this distinction between revenue and sales, which is sort of a new nuance like five or six years ago. So I thought CROs are evolving. They need to develop new competencies. They need to become leaders in revenue operations and real alignment. And that's a data process driven sort of a leadership role. And then also companies need to know how to work with a CRO and hire one properly. Neither one know how to do that. So I said, I'm going to start a company. I'm going to do this because nobody was. So I started the CRO collective with the intent to sort of develop The CRO role bring more precision to its definition, bring CROs to the marketplace that know how to do the job properly and help companies build what I call CRO ready organizations. So that's how I formulated the Yeah, I'm interested in the idea of being CRO ready. There's a lot of ways that SaaS organizations in particular, as they start to scale up, need to grow up, right? There's a lot of growth needed. And I'm just sort of wondering if you could define what you mean by CRO ready for us, because I think it's an interesting concept. I mean, I'm used to asking CEOs if I've never asked this question, so. Good point. I think they're different. I think a company can be investor ready well before they're CRO ready. I would even say, I'm not sure if I would make this a definitive thing, but I'd say it may be beneficial for a company to have funding before they get a CRO in some cases. It's a really interesting topic actually. I'm really glad you said that just now. It's kind of a cool thing to think about. But here's why I make the distinction. So you said something about grow up. It couldn't be more pertinent for how I talk about this. So I appreciate you giving me the kind of cue to bring this topic up because it's exactly right. So here's the thing, right? You see, look at a SaaS businesses and one wonders with all the success in the SaaS industry, which there's quite a bit, why is it, and you and I know this, they all, regardless, all these startups all seem to make the same exact mistakes. I mean, how many times have you spoke to somebody that works at a startup and they all say the same thing, which is, yeah, you know, it's the same old thing, you know, they can't figure this out, they can't figure that out. So there is this sort of weird dynamic with businesses, which is despite the fact there's been a lot of historical data to show how companies make the same mistakes, they still make them. It doesn't matter that you can kind of codify it. And here's why. I kind of formulated a thought around this. Before we started recording, you and I were talking about your daughter. I was talking about mine. And so we both can relate to what it's like to raise teenagers, right? Okay. We both know what that's like. And a lot of people listening to this know what it's like too. So a teenager is this really weird kind of an animal, right? Because they're part brilliant and part moron. And so when you're talking to a teenager, you recognize their genius, right? They have this incredible talents and they're at the peak of their powers in terms of their creativity. And they're just amazing. Like I was a teenager, the kind of things I did, but at the same time, I was an idiot. Like the decisions I made and the choices I made and my judgment was just awful. I mean, I really couldn't be counted on to make any really big decisions. If I kept within my scope, I probably could be okay. And no matter what my parents said to me, I still made the dumb decisions anyway. It didn't matter. You sort of have to let teenagers do their thing. They have to grow through it. Regardless of how many parents have been in history, about thousands of years, we can't codify or there's no suppository to give teenagers that they're smart all of a sudden. They're just going to be stupid. And I think SaaS companies, all businesses, are the same way. You can't teach them this stuff. They sort of have to go through these paces themselves. And it is an inevitability that things happen. And the only thing we can do is try to build systems around those mistakes and hope that they don't become too costly. I say the same thing to my kids. I'm like, you're gonna make dumb mistakes, just make sure the mistakes you make aren't ones that have long-term implications, right? Don't get pregnant, don't get addicted to drugs, right? That kind of stuff. The other things, I'd say you get arrested or you get knocked around or something that happens. It's okay. See, the mistakes have to be sort of managed. And I think the same thing with businesses. So I say this because when you look at a company, these growth stages are inevitable reality. They're not avoidable, but there's a point at which, like you said, they have to grow up. They have to become adults. And that happens more out of, I think there's a better word for this, like gravity, right? So what happens is that the companies reach a level of operational complexity when they reach success that forces them to grow up. They can't, you know, there's a notion, Ken, what got us here won't get us there. So they know that, right? There's a point at which any leader knows like, okay, this worked for us for a while, but like a teenager, they realize they have to go get a job and get responsible and start showing up on time and stuff like that. And I think when a company reaches this point, and I think there's some key markers and signals for this. One is the size of the company, the amount of money that they're making, the kind of customer complexity they have, the organizational structure of their business becomes more complicated. Maybe let's say more specifically the size of their sales force, the size of their marketing organization. the size of their customer base, the number of accounts that are managing, the scope of their revenues and stuff. When these things reach a certain threshold, it's usually 15, 20, 25 million in revenues, all of a sudden the company can't act like a teenager anymore if it's going to succeed. It just can't. And so this is the point at which I think companies need to be ready for a leader who can now kind of run the show and bring that more of a mature revenue discipline to the organization that can help it grow to a 50 or $100 million business. And that's when they need to become CRO ready. And that's what I do. I help find a company at that stage and I accelerate, not I, but my team accelerates this growth from teenager to That's really interesting. So now that you've put it in that context of where they are in their lives, I see exactly what you mean about You can get dollars at 10 million or even 5 million, right? I mean, if I believe in your business, I'll give you money for it. But that doesn't mean that you necessarily have the operational complexity where a CRO is necessary. And in fact, I'll just interject it here. This is a big mistake companies make is very often I'm at 5 million in revenues and I get money and all of a sudden I think I need a CRO and it's too early. That's a bad idea because CRO shouldn't be working at a company without that level of operational complexity. So their go-to motions won't work at a smaller It's just not, yeah. I mean, a real qualified CRO in the context that you were talking about here, like a real revenue leader that oversees a complicated revenue operation. is not needed yet. It's really a sales motion company at 5 million. You should be doing just a hunting the whole time. That's totally appropriate. So you need a head of sales, which is a different thing than a CRO. And so I think that's the whole misnomer, right? That's what happened is that CROs became sales leaders and by default, and that is a problem. I think in fact, it exacerbated some So we're completely off our planned talk track, but I think it's really worthwhile. I want to ask you Then is the fractional CRO potentially a It's a bad idea. Bad idea. I don't buy it. I have a strong opinion about this. I probably have the same thought. I have the conversation three times a week. I just, yesterday with somebody, someone called me up and asked me, they should be a fractional CRO. And I'll condense my answer a bit because it's lengthy. But basically, if you follow the logic, I just think If you agree with me that a company needs to hire a CRO at a point at which they're really complex, they need a leader for that, how could you do that fractionally? It doesn't make any sense. And how could someone do that fractionally? There's not a fit. Usually most fractional CROs, they're heads of sales. They get sales leads for companies, which is actually a good business. And I have no issue with people making money that way. Just, you're not a CRO. You're a fractional sales leader, which is fine. And I think this actually helps muddy the water a bit, in my opinion. I think fractional CROs who call themselves that only help to keep the CRO sales leader notion alive, which I think I'm trying to kill off. I don't think it's a good thing Well, I think that's a nice insight. One of the goals of the podcast is give people are with us on a dog walk or on a commute. Yeah. One or two pearls that they can actually. Okay. So I would say if someone's driving a car or walking their dog right now, and they're thinking about being a fractional CRO, I'd say, go for it. There's a big business out there for it, but you're going to be selling for all these companies. That's you're going to be doing. You're going to be a salesperson for these companies and they'll probably pay you well. And if you're good at it, you can have a good business at it. But I'll say it bluntly. You're But also if you're one of the C-suite people looking at this as a solution, keep in mind it's really I just don't see how, I haven't seen a company. I had this one guy I met who has a really cool business. He has a fractional CRO business. It is actually an interesting model. He has a team of like five people and so they hire him as a fractional CRO team and they sort of augment their revenue operation as a leader like for the while, but that's a temporary thing. I mean, if I was advising that company, let's say I was an advisor in that company and I found a fractional CRO team like that, I'd say, okay, that might be a good interim step. I mean, if you can get five people for the price of one and they're good, do it. But you want to get out of that as quickly as possible and hire someone full-time because that's ultimately what's really going to get you there. And it's a bridge between full-time CRO and part-time CRO. I just don't see many companies doing Well, you sold me on the idea, so I'll carry that around with me. Yeah, it could be a good business. Let's move on to some other stuff that we thought we were going to talk about. Sure, sure. I think we know the answer here about, are we moving past growth at all costs? I think we kind of are. Yeah, I do so. We're looking more at retention. Profitability. Acquisition. I think we should just talk briefly about what's driving that trend. And then what does that mean for the CRO? They own all revenues, so it's a It certainly does. Yeah. So I would say we are, I mean, I'm seeing the reality of it. I think it was sort of like some lip service being given to it maybe six months ago, but I think it's really happening. And the way I see it happening is, investor behavior is different. Companies are just not investing in these fast growth companies and just gain more customers. It's not really looked upon that well anymore. Companies are really being invested in that they see a sustainable business model where customers can be renewed and there's profitability and there's also cost efficiencies. Companies are... And this is good. Companies should have run this way all the time. It seems weird to me that we had to go through this whole almost 15 year phase to figure this out. But look, money was cheap for a long time. I mean, you had zero interest rates, which were amazing for businesses. I mean, why not? It was not that expensive to invest in stuff like this. Plus, there were enough of them that worked out with this acquisition model that people would invest in a company and buy a company that had no profitability. And the market sort of encouraged this thing, but it's not happening that much anymore. And I think it's great. I think it's really good news. I think what's going to happen now is I'm a big customer advocate. So for me, I think the customer was the loser. back then and now we're going to be the winner. We're going to get better products and more stickiness and better options. I think that's always good. I think the market should be customer centric because ultimately that's where businesses are really going to thrive and customers are going to be happy. So the implications for CROs are that more than ever now, a CRO really is needed who knows how to run a full cycle sales and go to marketing, go to market organization. Meaning it's not just about building a sales team and going out and acquiring customers. It's really about how do we identify them? How do we build our ICP model more effectively? How do we market to them? How do we do that in a way that doesn't become too salesy? How do we inform them and educate them and make them smarter? and build a relationship with them from day one? And how do we build organizations that are more process-wise, data-driven? Are they more aligned? And so the teams work together more in sync with each other as opposed to being in silos. And I think a CRO is the role for this. So I think, I wrote it yesterday, 2025 is gonna be the year of the CRO, in my opinion. It's gonna be the year where the pivot takes place. And CROs are really the real, interesting to think about it. The CRO is going to be reporting into the CEO and is also going to speak to the board, most likely. I mean, the CRO should be the board presenter, right? If I were the CEO and I had a really good CRO, I'd have the CRO report to the board and not report to the board, but present to the board. So that role is very dynamic. It's going to have a lot of nuance to it. And I think the implications are going to be technological. I think AI is just a huge bug in the machine right now. I mean, the amount of tasks that can be automated today that if a CRO really knows how to push these systems into their different process driven segments, particularly in the rev ops function, the analytics function and the predictability engines and stuff, AI can be incredible way to reduce costs. be leaner, hire better people, get more out of them, right? Have less salespeople, which are costly. And I think that it's going to be a really interesting time for the next three years. It'll be fascinating to see what happens. So Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. I think it's a very healthy way for an organization to run its go-to-market with good leadership. You can get these three disciplines, sales, marketing, success, talking to each other. The idea of shared KPIs becomes a lot easier if you're in one organization. But it also means the CRO has to have a lot of curiosity that the stereotypical, always be closing sales leader. Yeah. It's going to It's going to be hard. And the reason is because we put so much emphasis into this sales development and sales process development and sales excellence. I mean, it's an incredible amount of like 40 years of time we've put into creating this sort of competency that I'm not saying that it's no longer going to be useful. You still need to have a head of sales that knows how to do this stuff. They're just not going to be the most important person in the room anymore. It's really going to be someone who knows how to really build out a full go-to-market. That's really going to be a person who's really going to be I agree. And I want to turn the spotlight a little on the CMOs. Yep. And what does this mean for the person who has aspired to be the CMO only to find out that their direct path to the CEO might be closed off. What's the opportunity for Yeah, it's an interesting one. So I have a, not surprisingly, a rather provocative point of view on this too. I don't think that B2B companies should have CMOs anymore. I think that title is sort of going to be a bit confusing in the model that I'm proposing. And that's probably not going to be a good thing for someone who's jogging right now that happens to be a marketing person, but there's a good news. We don't have anybody who jogs. They either walk their dog or they drive. Great. Or they're on the couch or something. But yeah, so if someone's an aspiring CMO, I would say that's not a bad news thing. I'm packaging it that way, but I'd say it's better. Here's why. So yes, I mean, if companies follow this model, which I think they will, I think you're going to have a CRO really being the most important person, which means you're going to report to a CRO anyway. So this CMO title might be good because it looks good on your resume or it looks good on your LinkedIn profile, but that's all just sort of surface stuff. The reality is that in the old model, This is something I sort of can't believe people didn't figure out. In the old model, the CMO was always the most threatened title, right? Everyone knows that marketing was always the first to get disfunded. Now that's stupid, but the reason that was the case is because in the model we all identified from being like the older model, let's say we'll call it the older model, marketing is by definition because it's an acquisition at all costs, marketing is a cost center in that model, right? which makes it vulnerable. But in the model I'm proposing, marketing is a revenue center. It's critical. It has to be paid for. It needs to be part of the system. So there's a far more security in the model I'm talking about. Marketing is not going to be let go of ever. It has to be there, right? And I believe it should be because I think marketing is I have well agency for- This is an interesting little nuance in that probably the executive most position, best position to defend marketing is the sales team. The person that owns revenue is in the best position to go to No doubt about it. I love marketing. I'm a big believer in it. I have an agency for almost 20 years and we're good at it. For me, I'm not saying this as I have some disrespect for marketing. I just understand its value and that it's been placed in the wrong place. And as a result, it's been vulnerable unnecessarily, mainly because companies haven't given it the respect and it's not being implemented right. But it looked at like, ah, shit, we got to spend more money on this crap as opposed to we're not spending enough on this crap. It's important. And we need more discipline around this because if you think about it, I was talking about it before, if I'm a CRO and I want the full customer journey, that beginning part where we first touched the customer out in the marketplace with content or whatever, that's vitally important. It needs to be done really well. And we're going to be able to measure it now. I'm going to know its impact on a sale to the extent that I know now that the more money I spend on it, if it's effective, I'm going to get more back. So if I'm a CMO today, And you're listening to me right now, you're thinking, oh man, that's my future. I'm not gonna get my CMO job. I'd say that's the wrong ambition. The ambition should be a good marketer and be a practitioner who knows how to do the job well and have one that lasts a long time where you make a measurable contribution, which wasn't really possible before. So it's good news, right? So while I do think that the title should go away, I think the job needs to become more complex and more integrated into the system than it ever has been. And I think that's good news for marketers. So I think that's where it's Yeah. I guess I also saw it as a possibility that you could be the marketing leader that ascends. I could. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think it puts you in a potentially much better position if you can truly be a Yeah. I think marketing has a huge, it's a big opportunity for marketing and B2B. It hasn't been fully activated. There's such opportunity there. I mean, B2B companies can do a much better job of this. And I think that they can unlock it. They can become, it can be a brilliant way for I want to move on to another topic that I think is really important. We chatted about the sales and marketing software industrial Totally like the defense industrial complex. Crazy. Going back to Eisenhower, which a lot of people would be saying, wait, Eyes in who? Who's who? Yeah, right. Who's that? But I guess my take, having been a practitioner quite some time, is that actually a lot of these companies have distorted go-to-market. No question. Yes. They've introduced business practices that benefited the sale of the software much more than the organizations they were selling to. And I'm just sort of wondering what's going to change here. What do you see changing? Like with the SDR, AE dynamic, how's this going to play out as This is a battleground, Ken. This is a big battleground. Think about how many companies have invested billions of dollars in sales and marketing tech. and we want to maintain their market share. I mean, it's tough because I think it's a dead beast. Here is, I think like what happened was, it makes sense that companies are, business is smart, right? Business in itself is a very opportunistic sort of animal, right? So when you had this growth at all costs thing, there's two things that were going on at once. One was first, it was just the idea that we got to get acquisition as customers as quickly as possible, as many as possible. And the other part is, you know, we've got to do it fast, right? There's this real big speed. Everything's measured quarterly and there's this big banging the drum to close the deal this month or this quarter. And that means you got to be more efficient, you got to get more activity, right? Activity goals, all this that's really being measured. So it made sense that maybe 10, 15 years ago that companies would wise up and go, wow, okay, how can we improve efficiency? How can we make things accelerate more? How can we create more autonomy and stuff? So there was this slew of really brilliant tools that came out over the last 10 years that were designed specifically to make people dial more times or email more times or text people more times in an hour or a minute or a second. And they were effective. So it sort of created this, if I would say, almost like a metastasization of this cancer in the organizations that were, all this tech was being bought with the purposes of accelerating these tasks, which were just to reach people as quickly and as fast as possible. Remember, personalization and all this nonsense. And I think what happened was it strangely, like a cancer, I frankly think, really, it's a very good analogy. it accelerated the point at which the cancer needed to be killed off. The tumor couldn't last anymore. Customers can't deal with this crap. I mean, how many times can you reach out to in one day? The same person selling a X software to is the same person I'm going to sell a different software to. It's the same customers. It's a different need they have. So how many times is my productivity brain going to be stimulated by one thing and then my sales brain going to be stimulated by another thing? And I think that What's happened now is the shift is being moved over to the model that I think we talked about. And a lot of these tools are not going to be needed anymore. I don't think that SDR model was ever really a good long-term solution. I think it was a great solution for Salesforce. It was a brilliant one. It was the right thing at the right time. And the marketplace is not logical. Sometimes we look at like the SDR model at Salesforce was effective there. And so what we sort of do at the marketplace is we're kind of dumb. We look at it that way, go, wow, look what they did with the SDR thing. That's a really good idea. Let's do that. But we didn't think about the fact that it worked for them because of their specific situation and their specific place in the marketplace. And this time, no one can realize that it doesn't mean that it's going to be something that's replicable. It just means that it works this time. And I think everyone started to jump on the bandwagon and they started doing the same thing. And it became a habit. I can't tell you how many times I speak to my clients and they go, yeah, well, we're standing up our SDR team next week. I'm like, well, why are you standing up an SDR team? Like, give me your business case for that. What would it mean? I mean, you know, we need an SDR team. That's not an answer. I mean, give me the reason in your business that you need people calling customers for your salespeople. Why can't your salespeople do it? Sell that to me. And they really don't have an answer. It's like, I think we've just been sort of told this is just the way we do things now. It's like a new normal. And that's never a good idea. Never a good reason to do anything. So I do think these things are going to start to go by the wayside. I think the AI tasks are going to take over a lot of that stuff, frankly. And we're going to get back to salespeople who just have to get on the phone and sort of know how to do a little bit more outside the scope of just closing a deal or pulling somebody through the top end of the funnel. And I think it's good. I think it's really good. So I do think that tech is changing. I'm seeing more Yeah, and I think that the, I mean, I don't know, I went to an American Marketing Association annual conference like, I don't know, seven years ago. And I met this guy from the deep South. And he said something to me that I'll never forget. He said, I won't do a Southern accent because I'll get in trouble with my family. But he said, people want to buy from people. So the job of the salesperson is to become part of their frame of reference for their work life, right? Not for their life in general, but to have some place in the constellation of people in their work lives that they keep. We also see like sales trainers like Brian Burns against this measurement at It's crazy. It's nuts. Thank you. By the way, measurement It's so hard to make anything sensible out of that. Yes. When what's going to make me buy. is very different than what's going to make you buy. Yep. And the job of the salesperson is to figure that out, get you I agree. I agree. I would say though, I want to just kind of add a little point of view on that point you made, which is a bit of a twist on that. I do think that, yes, if I were to go around or to ask people on the street, I think they'd probably all say, yeah, I guess I'd rather be sold to buy a person. But here's what I really think is the truth. I think they're thinking about that like in an ideal situation where they sort of like the people that they're being sold to. The problem is that a lot of salespeople aren't really people I want to talk to. They're not really good. I get on the phone with them and they're SDRs and they have a script and it sounds really impersonal and I don't want to talk to any of these people. They're horrible. I think what I'm saying is, people are saying when they're saying that to you, that sentiment, not to you, but in general, that sentiment is being said like, yeah, you know, boy, I really need to get back to the old days where I'm just being sold by somebody who I like to talk to and somebody who really cares about me. They're speaking of that as that person. But the kind of people I'm talking to today don't do that. You know, it's nuts what happens today. Like, I had this happen once where I was looking to buy a piece of software, and so someone set up a demo for me, and I had a long email conversation with somebody before we finally got on the phone. So I get on the call, and somebody else is on the call. And I'm like, hey, who are you? And he's like, oh, yeah, I'm Steve. Bob handed over to me. I'm like, why? I was talking to Steve. He's a good guy. Yeah, well, this is the process we have. I'll get to this point and then I take over. I'm like, no, like why? Is it because it's better for you guys? It's more efficient for you to do it that way? That's not good for me because I was already talking to him and now I got to repeat myself to you. And he's like, no, no, no, that's not true. I have all the notes. I'm like, okay, so you have notes. but you don't have the rapport. We talked, so it's not the same thing. And then he's got somebody else sitting next to him, like in the other Zoom bubble. And I'm like, who's that guy? He's like, oh yeah, well, he's another person and he supports me on this engineering. And I'm like, the whole thing is broken. Like why couldn't you just have kept Steve on the phone with me the whole time? Like that would have been a much better experience for me. So what I'm saying is I don't think that companies care a lot about the experience the customer had. They cared more about their process, much more. And I think that this is where things are shifting, is they're thinking more about like, does this benefit the customer? Is this good for the customer? If you were the customer, would you like this? And if you don't, well then we're not doing it. Let's do it a different way. And I do think that we're gonna see a shift there And again, I do want to sort of say AI weirdly is going to help with that because it's going to get rid of some of that stuff that people need to do. They can get back to doing this again. So I do hope that's going to change because I don't like the way the sales operations are today. They're very sloppy. Well, I mean, that's the big opportunity in front of the CROs about to be minted. I think this is also a great place to land our episode. Thanks so much. Great conversation. I could have gone all afternoon. But if people want to learn more about how you're thinking, how can they reach you? Pretty much everything that I produce is on LinkedIn. So if you just go to my LinkedIn profile and just go back and you'll see like slews of white papers and videos that I've created and posts and stuff I've written. And there's a lot. I have a YouTube channel, The CRO Collective. So all my videos are there. I also have a podcast called The CRO Spotlight, which is good. I have about like 60 episodes and people write me all the time and seem to be pretty happy with it. So I'm really liking that. And my website has some good content there. I wrote up some things. And then I do a series of CRO round tables every quarter, maybe a couple of quarter. I did one in Chicago last week. I did one in New York about a month before that. And these are great places for chief revenue officer to just get together and have a conversation. I host those. And then I'm at the CRO, the Chief Revenue Officer Summit, which is an event that's produced by a London-based group that I'm the chairperson of. And I chair that event, and that's like about four or five times a year. And those are all over the country. So there's a lot of different places that you can find me, but mostly you want to reach me, just DM me on LinkedIn and say, Hey, I heard you on a podcast. I'd love And if people want to reach me on LinkedIn, it's LinkedIn slash in slash Ken Lempett. And my demand generation agency for SaaS is Austin Lawrence. And if you haven't subscribed to the podcast yet, please do so wherever podcasts are distributed. Warren Zenna, the CRO drum Thanks for being on the podcast. Thank