Ep. 145 - The Death of the MQL: A New Playbook for SaaS CROs

Guest: Randy Likas, Head of North America Go-to-Market at Nektar

Traditional marketing tactics are losing their edge, with MQLs falling short as costly, outdated signals of real buyer intent.

In this week’s episode, we explore tactics for CROs to tackle the “great ignore” with guest Randy Likas, Head of North America Go-to-Market at Nektar, a revenue efficiency platform that unifies customer interaction data and helps you discover new revenue opportunities.

Randy discusses how CROs must reevaluate their playbooks and processes, focusing on how to re-engineer strategies and redeploy technology to align with emerging trends in buyer behavior–positioning the CRO role as not just operational but transformational.

Key insights you'll gain:

• How changing buyer behaviors, like the "great ignore," are reshaping outreach strategies
• Why MQLs are losing relevance and how to focus on buying groups instead
• How breaking down silos between sales, marketing, and success boosts revenue efficiency

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

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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.

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Transcript

Ken Lempit: Welcome to SaaS Backwards, a podcast that helps SaaS CEOs and go-to-market leaders accelerate growth and enhance profitability. Our guest today is Randy Likas, head of North America Go-to-Market for Nektar, a revenue efficiency platform that unifies customer interaction data and helps you to discover new revenue opportunities. He's also the host of the Revenue Lounge podcast. Hey, Randy, welcome to the podcast.

Randy Likas: Yeah, thanks for asking me to join. Excited for our conversation. Me too.

Ken Lempit: This is just going to be great stuff. But before we dig in, could you please tell listeners a little more about yourself, Nektar, and the Revenue Lounge podcast?

Randy Likas: Yeah. So I've been selling pretty much my entire career. I started selling in the mid nineties. Over the course of my career, I've sold mostly in the technology space. Sometimes it's been services. Other times it's been platforms themselves. And other times it's been like services built on top of a software platform. About three and a half years ago, I started in the sales tech space and I've been with Nektar now for about 15 months. I joined Nektar because I spotted an opportunity that aligned with a lot of what I saw some of the trends going in, particularly B2B SaaS companies. And we are filling a gap in the space that a lot of the tech providers don't solve for right now. And I am also the host of the Revenue Lounge podcast, which is Nektar's podcast. And we will bring go-to-market leaders from sales, customer success, marketing, revenue operations. Part of our goal is to just bring thought leadership to the market, understand how each practitioner and their respective function is thinking about their business, changes that they see that may impact their business. And, you know, we have a network of listeners that from those four respective functions that, you know, with feedback we've gotten is it delivers a lot of great value. So.

Ken Lempit: That's all about me. Well, that's great. And you're describing Nektar's go-to-market sort of very parallel to what's happening in the business, right? I think the folks like a GTM partner is really driving the idea of a sort of a new model for go-to-market itself. There's this like major transition happening in how SaaS firms structure the revenue. that they're generating. And CROs seem to be taking the lead, marketing, reporting now to the CRO who owns all of revenue, including marketing, sales, and success. So from your perspective, what's going on here and why?

Randy Likas: Yeah, I mean, the B2B SaaS market has changed quite a bit over the last 18 months, right? There was a lot of technology and tools that were built, I'd say, from 2016 on to help companies really do more, right? And do more activities and do more. And when sort of the bottom fell out prior 2015, 2016, everybody was about top of the funnel growth and revenue growth and not really caring about profitability. And, you know, a couple of years ago when the market started falling out and a lot of companies had to make a change to be more efficient in the revenue growth. And so as a result of that, you know, they've made a lot of changes in their different go to market motions. I think historically, a lot of companies have and functions within the company have acted in their own sort of silo. Right. And The chief revenue officer ultimately by its definition is someone who owns all of revenue and is responsible for all of the different functions that make up revenue. Some are better at that than others, right? There's still a lot of companies who are still existing in silos, but I think an effective CRO is somebody who can collaborate cross-functionally, align the company's growth goals and revenue goals, and look at how the different functions within the organization can work more in an orchestrated fashion, as opposed to continuing to live in these silos.

Ken Lempit: So there was a lot there. I got to unpack some of this. First of all, there is a ton of sales and marketing tech, right, in a lot of these companies. I don't know if all of it is driving really good behavior, like behavior consistent, especially with how buyers want to buy. Is the organizational change where the CRO is more and more often having this wider purview going to change kind of what tech goes into these companies and why?

Randy Likas: I think so. And I think, put the tech aside for a moment. I think there's some things going on right now, trends that are happening that the CRO is going to have to think about how they use the tech a little bit differently. So I'll give you an example. A lot of the sales engagement platforms that were hugely popular over the past couple of years have really driven a lot of bad behavior, right? So the idea is, Let's load these sequences up for SDRs and AEs who are responsible for running some of their own pipeline with these messages that we want to drive. And instead of being thoughtful, I think in the hands of the SDRs, you have used them as kind of spam cannons. And so, you know, there's all these automated messages that get sent out and don't reply a couple of days later. It's another automated message that gets sent out, you know, thoughts, right? And I think what's happened is, is a lot of people are now just sort of immune to that type of thing and they can spot it a mile away, right? So you, you probably get a lot of emails in your inbox. There's probably, you know, you go through your mental spam filter where you know which one's important and which one's not. And I think what's happened is we're in this period of what we refer to as the great ignore, right? People are just not responding back to messages. They're not picking up their phone as much. They don't recognize the number on their phone. And so it's really challenging. to get people to lean in and take a meeting. I was on a podcast about a month ago and the host of that podcast had said that he was a host of a round table of CROs. And I think the stat was like 30 to 50% of net new meetings were down from a year ago. And I think that's all part of this sort of great ignore. I think buyer preferences are changing, right? People now don't necessarily want to talk to a salesperson, don't need to talk to a salesperson out of the get-go. They can do a lot of research on their own. There's communities where they can bounce ideas off of people that are in similar roles as they are. I think there's some big macro things that are happening or trends that are happening, which is going to require CROs to think a little bit different in terms of how they go to market. MQLs used to be the measurement that we all looked at as far as helping generate pipeline. Well, MQLs aren't as effective any longer. The cost to get MQL is going up, the quality is going down. And so I think CROs have to take a look at their existing playbooks and existing processes and think about how do we re-engineer these and redeploy the tech to align more with some of these trends that are happening.

Ken Lempit: Well, listen, you're speaking the gospel as far as I'm concerned. I think I wrote a recent blog post about the enterprise lead gen KPIs are BS because I just don't believe lead gen applies to any product where the ARR is more than a hundred thousand dollars a year. I just don't think it's even a sensible thing to be measuring. So that MQL was a manufactured. notion of interest. You know, I've been following this guy, Kyle Poyar, used to be at OpenView, now started his own venture firm. And I really agree with his view of, you know, what we should be measuring, you know, the idea that there's a total addressable market, like a serviceable addressable market, like people have different ways of describing that. But basically there's a bunch of people we think we can sell to in a reasonable fashion. And we're going to try and measure our awareness and engagement and traction in terms of pipeline, not these other things. that may not ever lead to sales, right? And I think the breakdown is that there's no correlation, very loose correlation between MQLs and pipeline.

Randy Likas: Well, and think about, you know, an MQL is one person, right? It's one person that's hit a certain score to qualify for us to give them a call. Very rarely, and especially in a large sale like the ones you're referencing, is a decision ever made by one person. It's always going to be made by a buying group. And depending on who you look at the research, whether it be Forrester or Gartner or Challenger or whoever it might be, the buying committees are north of 10, 12, 15 people. And it just gets larger the more complex the product is. And so And MQL as the measurement of demand gen is not as effective as it was years ago. And I think it's what we're seeing and what we coach a lot of our clients to think about is let's look for ways in which we could engage the buying group and the buying committee and qualify a buying committee early on in the process. The companies that have made a move to this motion are actually seeing incredible improvements in terms of win rates, conversion, deal velocity, and so, you know, I think it's a trend that we're gonna continue to see in a lot more companies that are gonna be leaning into in 2025.

Ken Lempit: Yeah, I mean, it's sort of, to me, it's the formalization of, like, some of the sales techniques that were working before, like combo prospecting. Hey, I'm going to try and talk to more than one person in this organization. Right. So we're trying to elevate the successful people called motion, but like behaviors and yeah, and tactics, sales and marketing tactics that actually started to generate results. So now we're going to try and formalize that. And, you know, I was reading a recent GTM partners email that came across. And it sort of struck me that that's finally happening.

Randy Likas: If I could say at one point there, Ken, I think like it's funny because when you talk to like a sales leader and you talk about this idea of a buying group, it's kind of like a, well, no, duh. Like, of course, I've got to be multi-threaded in my account. I've got to talk to multiple people. Like, so sales kind of gets it from a conceptual standpoint. I think where it gets challenging, though, is the alignment with the other functions of the organization. Right? And you know, if marketing is gold on MQLs or getting them to think about buying groups and orchestrating sort of the breaking down those silos and working more closely together around this idea of a buying group is where it gets challenging for a lot of companies.

Ken Lempit: Yeah. I mean, I totally agree with you. I mean, I know I did sales training decades ago at IBM and it was like, who else is in on this decision? Right. I mean, so I think you're absolutely right. It's almost like marketing's finally becoming more like, I'd call it fused to sales. Like there's a fusion happening and that's probably really healthy. I want to move on because I have sort of some like organizational and career interests here that I wanted to touch on, which is, you know, how does someone who's traditionally led any one of these functions, sales, marketing, or success kind of grow into this CRO role? I mean, people aren't just like born CROs. So if you're a marketing leader, you know, you were CMO, that job's being subsumed right into the CRO role. So how do you position yourself as a CMO who might want to qualify for that CRO role?

Randy Likas: Yeah, it's a great question. I think a lot of it is sort of unfolding before us. A good CRO knows their limitations to a certain degree. Like they're bringing together and breaking down the barriers between the functions, but they're going to rely on the people that lead those respective organizations from a marketing perspective to have the expertise that they don't. If someone is a sales leader or someone is a marketing leader or even a customer success, like how do we grow to the zero? And I think what's important is somebody who can lead and manage change or identify that when change needs to happen, build cross-functional relationships. look at how, you know, of course, prior success is sort of a foundation of that we've had to be able to build on top of successes. But I think that if you just look at the role of a CRO, which is to break down barriers, align goals, align processes, people who have done that in previous roles, whether they be marketers or sales, like that's important. criteria or characteristic. And so I think you have to think about this is not just what I need to deliver, but how do I deliver it sort of cohesively with all my respective functions? And if you can do that, I think you're setting yourself up for at least the right set of skills to be a candidate for CRO.

Ken Lempit: So maybe there's also sort of a valuable note for CEOs. If you're going to hire your first CRO, you're growing up enough that, you know, it's sort of the right time in your organization's growth trend. You need someone who's really more thoughtful, right? Going to be able to lead people to a vision rather than do it all him or herself. That's what I'm saying.

Randy Likas: 100%. And I think, you know, this probably goes without saying, right? But we're living in a time right now of big data, right? And somebody who's very much data-driven, right? And who can look across the organization, sort of connect different dots of different areas that would fit someone who wants to be a CRO is a very data-driven person as well.

Ken Lempit: Interesting. I think as the CRO, they're going to have to get the CFO to align with them right on the entire organization's revenue strategy and plan and probably report up to the board. So that ability to be very comfortable building, managing, and reporting data, probably a key skillset as well.

Randy Likas: Yeah, and also, you know, think about some of the big changes that we talked about MQLs being less effective, like boards right now, you know, you go to a board meeting and they want to know how you're doing on demand, Jen, and what's the key metric they're measuring on is MQLs, right? So you also need somebody who can sort of lead that change and communicate effectively to the board, like why we need to make that change, right? So we got to hit our quarterly goals, but we also have to think in advance in terms of where things are going and be able to sort of have that ability to communicate, not just to our teams below us, but higher to the CEO and higher to the board as well.

Ken Lempit: Yeah, it might almost pay, going back a few moments here, for if you're a new CRO and you know you're going to get that question, try and run a correlation study between MQLs and revenue, right? Because you want to be able to kill the MQL as soon as possible.

Randy Likas: Yeah, one of the best ways to do that is look at your historical deals over the past year and take a look at what percentage of your MQLs have converted into close one revenue. And then, you know, maybe look at it when we had a well-defined buying committee that we knew who the stakeholders were, maybe before we converted it over to sales or even early stage sales where we will qualify a buying committee early. Like what improvement does that have on win rates and deal acceleration? Looking at the data, looking at the patterns of the data and bubbling that up certainly helps tell that story.

Ken Lempit: So, I mean, we've sort of described two things driving this change. I just want to make sure we sort of underline it a little bit. So we've got the buyer behavior changing. They're acting more as groups. And you said very briefly something that I think we've come to know that buyers are self-serving a lot, right? I mean, we get that from our own insights as well as third parties like Trust Radius who do that report every year on buyer behavior. as well as Gartner, Forrester, everybody else. So people are doing their own research before they want to engage with sales and the VCs and PEs are putting a lot of pressure on us to be profitable. Is there anything else driving the change or are those the two big things that are making it happen?

Randy Likas: I think the third thing I would just add is what got us here isn't necessarily going to get us there. These playbooks that we've designed that have gotten us to where we are just need to change and they need to change based on the things we just talked about, the changing preferences. So let's just really unpack it and give a very tactical example here. Buyer preferences are changing. Sixth Sense came out with a report about a month ago where they said across all of their research, 70% of the buyer's journey is happening without sales getting involved. And they don't want to talk to sales. So what does that mean for SDR, right, who's trying to drive meetings every call they make? How do we need to redeploy those resources in a different way to align with some of these trends that we're seeing? Because the existing playbooks is have them call 100 people a day to try to drive a meeting. And it's just not as effective as it was a couple of years ago. And so I think that's an important aspect of it is given some of these sort of macro things that we're seeing, what do we need to do internally to make these changes to align and meet our goals?

Ken Lempit: So like if you're publishing great research, like a six cents or trust radius, what would you do with SDRs? I mean, should they be looked more as like a marketing, you know, awareness generation function and have SDRs try and get people to accept research instead of accept a meeting? you know, like drive people, drive the thought leadership where you think it needs to be in the organization with these early career people?

Randy Likas: I think SDRs and AEs should be partnering closer together on their accounts and sort of doing a divide and conquer. And I'm speaking more on the upmarket segments, right, the enterprise segments type of thing. But, you know, if we've got 15 accounts as an enterprise rep that we are trying to break into, Let's not leave it up to the SDR to try to call anybody that they can to get a meeting. Let's work strategically together to figure out how are we going to penetrate this account? What are the personas that are important to us that we want to break into? And maybe it's redeploying the SDR to be a little bit more strategic, doing some research on these people, identifying these potential buying group members, meeting them. When they do an outreach to someone, maybe it's less Hey, I saw you attended our webinar. Would you like to schedule a meeting? But it could be something like, hey, I saw you attended our webinar. What we didn't have time to discuss, but what a lot of other people find valuable is X, Y, Z, you know, would be helpful if I sent that along to you, right? Or. I understand you've attended this webinar. A lot of people that attend this webinar are typically early in their evaluation right now. Is there anything that I can do to help, you know, as you're sort of kicking this initiative off? As opposed to, so you attended the webinar, do you want to get on a call and talk with me, right? So I think it's a realignment on, you know, making sure that the SDR can meet sort of the buyer where they're at in the journey. Now that doesn't mean they shouldn't ask for a meeting, right? But maybe don't ask for like, because you saw a signal that they attended a webinar. Right? It's just, I think it's a little bit of a change. And I think what's going to happen, Ken, is that as SDRs are deployed a little bit differently to sort of meet the buyer where they are, they're building the digital relationship with them and they're building a bit of a trust. And those digital relationships will turn into in-person relationships. Right? So at a certain point that you will get that meeting because you've been delivering value to them. But I think we just have to rethink a little bit around this metric of we're going to goal you and measure you on how many meetings that you can generate And that's, well, that's still going to be important function of them. Maybe it's a little bit less of that, and it's more, we're going to work with you in tandem with the AE to help drive access into an account over a longer period of time.

Ken Lempit: So if we're tasking the SDR differently, how's the AE's job going to be different?

Randy Likas: Well, it depends on the organization. So some organizations are still operating where SDRs, you know, slash marketing's job is to generate leads. They'll pass them over to me and then I'll qualify those leads. And the ones that are, you know, sales accepted leads, I'll work as opportunities and close those opportunities. We're seeing more and more of this today where because SDR organizations have gotten smaller and because it's not necessarily like a one-to-one or a one-to-two ratio, like AEs should own a portion of their own pipeline development and have a number associated with self-generated. And so the answer to that question is going to depend on the way organizations sort of deploy and incent. But I think what's always going to be the case is that at a certain point, something is going to become an opportunity. And the AE's job is going to be to quarterback that opportunity and run it through the process and close that deal. I think what we're going to see a little bit of a change, though, is maybe earlier in that sort of the pipeline development phase, a better coordination between SDR and oh, by the way, we're doing that at that level. That means we're also going to be better coordinated at the higher levels as well.

Ken Lempit: I think also like embedded in this whole conversation has been sort of a better quality of relationship, like getting away from not just the manufactured MQL, but this manufactured SDR predictable revenue model that worked for Salesforce 20 years ago. that's probably not possible even anymore. People are still doing it, God bless them, but I think there's a point at which the diminishing returns become painfully obvious. So I think there's a lot of change in terms of quality of engagement that I think we really have to focus our own management and our board on instead of the demand gen MQL model.

Randy Likas: And it's hard, right, because we still have to deliver quarterly numbers and it's a hard role and there's a lot of change involved. But I think that's the way that things are going and we'll see more people doing it.

Ken Lempit: Yeah, I mean, look, hey, revenue is the number, right? In the end, revenue is the focus. Right. And I think that's another thing the CRO can do is focus the board on revenue. The things that lead up to revenue are different than they were before. Here's stuff you can look at, but don't be expecting form fills to drive revenue.

Randy Likas: And let's not forget the importance of customer success, right? Because pipeline is so hard to develop right now and get the top of funnel. More and more companies are focusing in on making sure all of our customers that we're delivering value against those customers. And as new stakeholders get involved, make sure we capture who the stakeholders are, coordinate it with the AE. If you're a platform product where maybe you have point solution, but you've now built a platform that have other capabilities, you know, who are those other people that are involved in maybe those expansions that the customer success team is identifying and coordinating back with the rest of the organization. So, you know, that's kind of, again, where that orchestration comes in, where customer success may be identifying people that are very important, not only to the renewal, but maybe to some expansion opportunities. But if they're not communicating that back to the AE or back to marketing to go target these people with highly specific content that's relevant to them, like there's big misses. And so I think equally important is also customer success side of things and bringing them into the fold and aligning them to this whole revenue motion as well.

Ken Lempit: Yeah, you know, I'm really glad you brought that up because so many of our clients, you know, they push the new logo problem at us because that's the toughest nut to crack, but they are missing the low hanging fruit of their own customer base if they're solely focused on that. It's really interesting. I mean, we do have clients where they literally don't focus the energy on the customer base and there's so much opportunity there. Maybe that's another reason for the CRO position to exist at all, is again, this holistic view of where does revenue come from. So what can CROs do differently with data today? What can their systems do for them that maybe wasn't true a year or two ago to help orchestrate revenue? Maybe what does the model tech stack look like in 2025? You know, like you don't have to get too specific, probably should consider Nektar. But let's talk about what does that tech stack look like to support the CRO and because of her mission.

Randy Likas: Yeah, I mean, I think first and foremost, the technology is at a point right now where you should be able to auto capture a lot of the activities, contacts, context. Right. So, like, what is it about meetings and emails that people are part of? Like, are they part of opportunities? Were they part of historical opportunities? Like what sort of like, you know, institutional knowledge about the customer? You should be able to capture that fairly easily and automate that so that reps aren't spending time. If you're still a CRO and you're hammering a rep on entering information into the CRM, you're kind of missing some real opportunities to be more efficient, more effective. Now, you do have to have this rep like update forecasts and things like that. That's important. But like if you're asking people to like update activities and add context in the CRM, I mean, the technology got to a point right now where you've got to make that work for you. Right. So so I think first and foremost is making sure that we can unlock a lot of the data that is typically stuck or siloed in different systems into one system, a source of truth, if you will, that we can help make better data driven decisions. And there's a lot of platforms out there that will help do some of that. I think one of the key things companies need to think about, though, is Are they bringing that data into their own UI and interface for Salesforce to work on? Or are they bringing it into a system of record or a system of truth that all of the different functions and all of the different technologies that sync into those platforms can derive value? I'll give you very specific examples. Let's say we've got all these opportunities that have 10, 12 people on them. If you look at an opportunity record in CRM right now, most of the time you've got one person on there. The 11 other people never make its way in. Well, how does marketing then go retarget individuals that they don't know exist, that they don't know that they've been part of a previous deal? All of that Marketo or product, like whatever your marketing automation platform feeds off of good contact hygiene in CRM. And, you know, there's a missed opportunity. It follows some sort of living in other places. So first and foremost, let's look at what is our system of record. And by the way, it's not always CRM. Like a lot of companies are now saying we can put it into a data lake and look at different things. But I think that's the first thing. And then you think about, OK, now, if that is the goal, What are the different technologies in our stack that we should have for our reps to help free them up to do that? And there's other functionality of those systems that don't necessarily work out of CRM, but derive value, right? So, you know, AI and predictive analytics to help look at different deals. But I think most importantly is how do we break down all these different data silos, get them into one system so that the rest of the stack can work as efficiently as effectively as possible.

Ken Lempit: You bring up that one small use case of we have an opportunity with Boeing and we have one name. How do we get the other names in our CRM so marketing can do that job?

Randy Likas: Yeah. I mean, Nektar being one of them, there's several companies right now that can do that. They can automatically go in, harvest all those communications out of you know, emails, calendars, Zoom, Teams, whatever you might use and populate that, at least unlock it, right? Now, the question is some of those tech will keep it in their own UI. They're not truly writing everything back to Salesforce. And that's where you've got to do, you know, some due diligence and understand sort of when they say, oh, we've got a Salesforce sync, like, what does that really mean, right? What are you actually writing back and going a little bit, a level deeper. You know, manual entry is ridiculous. You don't want to do that anymore. The tech has gotten to a point where you can automate so much of that. Now, what that does, it frees your teams up to work on more strategic things, right? To drive deals forward and deliver more value to our existing customers, for marketing to develop better campaigns based on what we know about the personas that we've engaged with. So let the technology work for you. But again, there's tough technologies out there that do that, but just do the due diligence to understand If we're trying to drive towards a system of record, help me understand how your particular technology is going to do that.

Ken Lempit: Yeah, I think that's a subtlety that… we should maybe highlight, we put it in bold, let's highlight it. The tech is great, but it has to be able to deliver its value where you're going to use the data, right? You're going to use the insight in a CRM or in an advertising platform. That data has to get out and get where it needs to go. If it's stuck in a solution, it's going to be less useful to you. I think the other thing you brought up that I guess I haven't heard, maybe it's my own reading and exposure, is the idea that the CRM may not be the system of record in some future that's not too far off? Is that something you're seeing actually out in the field?

Randy Likas: I have had some conversations with some customers where they're saying, I don't necessarily have to have everything in the CRM. There might be some important things where we can just port it directly over to a data lake, as an example. There's a give and a take, if you will, in terms of what do I want in the CRM and what do I want? And a lot of companies are actually taking it once in the CRM and bringing it over to a data lake, right? But some companies are actually bypassing that entirely. I think there's an interesting conversation. Is the CRM that we know today going to be in this, it's going to be, what's it going to look like in three years, right? With AI and everything else. Do we have to have everything in a structured CRM system? Or if we have in a data lake and we can now start comparing different data sets side by side with each other, perhaps the data lake is going to be the CRM of the future. I think it's years off, but it's certainly an interesting conversation to have.

Ken Lempit: I think it's super interesting and would also free organizations up to decide what's going to act on the data in a way that they aren't now, right? So because the CRM, it's like data goes in, but it doesn't always want to come out and it doesn't want to come out in a way that's necessarily useful to go to a different CRM. So kind of imposing a data repository against all your go-to-market software for larger organizations might make a lot of sense. Last question. I think that CROs are probably trying to figure out how to be successful, right? We saw CMOs have this really short lifespan and maybe we're almost looking at the sun setting of the CMO in some ways. So what can CROs do to be successful? Do you have any ideas for people maybe going into that job? Like what's the day-to-day quarter to quarter, two or three or four things they should be managing to be most successful?

Randy Likas: Yeah, I don't necessarily know that the CMO role is ever going to go away. I think depending on where the CRO came from, they might not just have the technical chops to really understand what it takes to do a marketer's job. I think the trend that we're seeing, and guess what? There's a lot of CMOs that are bucking this trend as well saying, I'm going to report into the CEO. I don't want to report into a CRO. And so there's interesting conversations going on inside of an organization when a new CRO was hired. I just want to be clear that I don't necessarily know the CMO role is going away. I just think that they're going to be partners. And so what does a CRO need to do? They need to build those cross-functional relationships. They need to align around core goals, core revenue goals, understand the orchestration between the different function to hit those revenue goals, be change leaders inside of their organization, know how to affect change. Just as much as, you know, leading teams and managing teams, they need to lead up or manage up. Right. And we talked about that earlier about making sure that we align the board and the rest of the C-suite around things. So those are some of the key things I think a CRO needs to do, but let's not forget that this is also a lot of times changing culture. And that's why I bring up the change management piece to it. Like we've got to be able to understand how to effectively get buy-in to drive change in an organization.

Ken Lempit: That's a great place to land our episode. Randy, if people want to reach out to you, learn more about Nektar, how can they do that?

Randy Likas: Yeah, randy.likas, L-I-K-A-S, at Nektar.ai, it's N-E-K-T-A-R, would be the best way. I'm on LinkedIn. You can reach out to me on LinkedIn as well. Happy to have any conversations with anybody in the future.

Ken Lempit: Perfect. And if people want to reach me, I'm on LinkedIn slash in slash Ken Lempit. My advisory firm for SaaS organizations is Austin Lawrence, Austin Lawrence dot com. And if you haven't subscribed to the SaaS backwards podcast, please do so wherever podcasts are distributed. Randy, like us. Thanks so much for a great conversation today. Thank you, Ken. Really enjoyed it.