How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love QBRs

Feel like Adam, you make fun of me, but I’m always like, how do we make it better? How do we make it the best? Right? Like, it’s just that’s now the standard. Well, I mean, I think me making fun of you is because I’m insecure because I’m thinking myself, yeah, I’m thinking this IT thing. How do you smash the status quo? Because again, like, going back to being bold, like, be bold. It’s more interesting. Right? It makes the day go by. Like, if you just sit there and, you know, you’re pulling the lever and doing the same thing quarter after quarter quarter. Like, there’s no reason why the goal of your organization that getting to those business goals can’t also be something that is paradigm smashing for your career, for your self, for your team. This is revenue makers, the podcast by Sixth Sense investigating successful revenue strategies that pushed companies ahead. Hey, Adam. Yes. Happy new year. Our new fiscal year just started today. Oh, yes. It did. Didn’t it? I don’t even know. The time goes by so quickly. And I don’t know what day it is anymore. In hard to tell. So what does end of year mean to you? It actually gets me a little worried about three little letters that I’m not necessarily Always excited about. We should do a QBR. We hundred percent should. I feel like we started this podcast a quarter ago. We have had some pretty great conversations, and we should talk about what we learned. I mean, when we started this whole thing, It was a bit of an experiment, but I feel like it’s turned into some great conversations, some great insights, And I learned a whole lot and maybe we could synthesize in our QBR. Yeah. This may be the world’s first podcast QBR. I think that one may set a trend. We may set a trend, but then now I have a question because we all need another QBR like we need a hole in the head. Right? If we do this QBR, does this mean we have to do another QBR? And we have to now stick with it and do this every quarter. Well, I think we record this, and then we just send it to all of our business leaders. Actually, you know what? Just send it to the board. It’ll just replace our board process as well. I think get it all done in one like, we’re doing the board meeting via podcast. I think that would be absolutely perfect. I love it. Done. Okay. That’s a fair trade off. Okay. Good. Okay. So with that said, we both have been in the B2B world for number of years. I know. And when it comes to the QBR time, do you have any habits or superstitions that you kind of rile up every time you start thinking about QBR time? Yeah. I start to panic more because I feel like I need to know everything about everything. To me a QBR is preparation, to me a QBR is understanding what happened, of course, in the quarter, but putting it into context, is it good? Bad? Did we hit our goals? And we all know how it works on the revenue team. Right? You’re closing deals till the last day. Every rep’s gonna flip their pipeline to qualified on the last day, and so leading up to it no matter how good you are, no matter how much of a cross as it is, you almost need that quarter to close, hit refresh, and then almost be able to just exhale and say, okay, this is what we did. And so the week after quarter end for me is by far the busiest. The one that I wanna almost block off my calendar and go into dashboard Excel warehouse and just get my nerd on? It’s similar. It’s panic. It’s also PowerPoint hell or Google slash hell, whatever it may be. And then it’s also the panic of whoever’s working in the deck. Commenting and tagging you for a question or, hey, what happened here? What happened there? I think the one thing that you forget about in a QBR is, like, taking five seconds to look beyond the numbers a bit. Wow. What just happened in the quarter? Was it wow. What a great quarter or oh, shit. That was a bad quarter. What do we do? So I would definitely say trying to take a second and sort of excel and say, okay. Well, here are the numbers, but what does it mean? And, like, if it was good, then celebrate that for a minute before you actually, okay, go into the data and start really ripping it apart because, you know, you’re gonna have to share with everybody. Yeah. It’s a great point, right, to just take a moment and look back. So we’ve done twelve ish episodes. As I think about it, there’s a couple of great guests, but some themes that I’ve really sort of emerged, right, and stuff that I think that we can bring up again and sort of summarize and think about, like, how it applies to even us at our daily lives as well. You’re beginning to sound like the regular QBR process. Okay. We build a hundred slides. We build over a hundred slides, frankly, and then we ask everyone to synthesize it up to three, four things. Since. And so is that what we’re gonna do? Do you know what that word gives me the shakes? A little bit, I think. Take another word then. Wait. Wait. No. No. Summarize. Summarize. Distill Distill. Essence, get the essence of those conversations that we’ve had. That’s it. I like that essence. K. That’s it. So the essence, one thing that I thought about was all of these conversations, especially with our own internal folks. We talked to Carrie Cunningham. We talked to Latney and Sam Jacobs from Pavilion, b to b buying has changed. And it’s changing right now. I mean, it’s changing while we’re recording this. So, I mean, Carrie had data, like, hard data about it, but the economy and the way companies are funded now, the way doing business in a world of, like, just spend spend spend versus now we’re in the new world of Oh, wait a minute. We’re actually gonna make some money here. That’s kind of thematic across most of the episodes, I feel like. It is. And even Heidi Mellon, who is an investor in other companies, even the expectations of the revenue team. And then with the proliferation of AI, and Nicole talked so much about that, it really is about being more resourceful, being more efficient, being more pointed with where you’re spending your money and how you’re looking to drive results. But at the heart of it, and maybe you can talk a bit more about Carrie’s report, because I feel that’s the perfect example. At the heart of it, you have to put the customer and the prospect at the center of everything that you’re doing. Carrie is are quan chalk at the end. Right? He’s incredible with looking at the data and and the statistics and all that, but they’re mind blowing because they’re actually pretty simple in terms of their scope, but what they mean is daunting. There’s buyers are evaluating whether it’s software, whatever it may be. Seventy eight percent of the time when they’ve reached out to you, or they’re engaging with you, they’ve got their requirements down. They know what they need that’s not gonna change. They’re kind of in the home stretch. You go back a couple of years. This is completely different, right, because sales and all that was much more of a gatekeeper, but now technology and research and and just constant being everywhere, people have gotten so far between that and social and communities you’re not selling anymore. You’re just kinda like trying to not get in the way of somebody who wants to buy in a sense. So that was one of the big numbers that was there. And then there’s this other sort of thing that basically a buyer can be seventy percent of the way through their journey. When you start talking to them. Seventy percent. You missed out on a whole lot of stuff that they did on their own. It’s remarkable to me. Absolutely remarkable. And what does that mean for marketers and sellers and all that? To me, it means guess what marketing is doing whole lot of that heavy lifting. The messaging, the positioning, the content that is out there is doing so much of the heavy lifting of bringing those buyers along the journey, it isn’t that m q l. Right? It’s about getting in front of them. It’s about removing gates and removing friction and educating and making sure you are in the places where conversations are happening, whether it’s online, but whether it’s in communities where folks are learning from their peers. It’s just so much about that integrated experience. And, frankly, that’s what marketing does. It just puts it to the forefront everything that, you know, we’ve been saying forever. It’s not marketing source versus sales source. We are taking those prospects along a journey and marketing has to do so much of that work upfront. And in terms of upfront, another mind blowing stat, eighty four percent of buyers, the first vendor that they contacted, one. So, again, it’s not about getting to them first. It’s about all that time that went on, whether you weren’t engaged with them You need to be in front of them in some form or fashion. You need to be feeding. You need to be making and I think I said in the carry episode that content marketers have some serious job security because they’re in product marketers who are developing this type of content because you gotta feed it, and you gotta get it in front of them. You have to engage indirectly in every possible channel so that when they do that, they’re like, oh, who else am I gonna contact with this company? There’s nobody else I would Right? And that Their mindset. That is a huge job for everyone. That’s, of course, marketing, but sales, it’s business development, it’s everybody. Everyone’s got a role to play there. Yep. They’ll call you is basically what I took away from Carrie, which means you’ve gotta inspire them and educate them along the way. In one sense, it’s scary, but another sense, it sort of does bring some really creative thinking. Like, how do you surround these buyers stay top of mind stay out of their way until they’re ready is really kind of what it is right too because then you could turn them off with tactics or just being a little bit too aggressive stay in front of them as well. So, like, it’s a delicate balance. Yeah. Which, to be honest, this brings me to another theme that was very, very clear through all of our conversations. And as you build content, as you educate, inspire that prospect. You have to differentiate. You have to be bold. You have to cut through the noise. We talked about the mutiny campaign where they tried something new. We talked about AI and using it to ideate and, like, just expand the reach of your team and the ability to put out more content and obviously not all AI generated content, but even just improve and drive more efficiency within your existing teams, you gotta do it. I mean, that and the mutiny example in Molly, the team created a game show. With prizes, and it was called the survey a Iver. I mean, I forget that it was a I mean, we spent five minutes talking about how to say it, but it was truly, like, It was different. It definitely got Bbo’s attention, and the I was lucky enough to be able to participate. I did a session. And for a good two weeks after. I just got random LinkedIn messages from random people saying, hey, saw your session, you know, enjoyed it. People I never heard of. That were clearly engaged. And Mutely is, you know, their six cents partner. We work closely with them. They’re small nimble team, and they did this thing, and it was just everywhere because it was so different. In a lot of these episodes, we talk about the guests and what they’re doing, but I feel like the six cents marketing team did something pretty special. Yep. This integrated campaign that, Adam, you win, but I just wanna preface this by saying It was bold in the sense that even the day before we launched it. We questioned if it was just funny to ourselves Were we in our own little echo chamber where we were giggling and having so much fun with it, would it resonate? How would it land? So talk about this integrated campaign. Yeah. So just to get a little buzzword. Right? I mean, integrated campaigns and integrated marketing. Right? I think that’s something that a lot of especially as teams get larger and they’ve got an events team. They’ve got a field marketing digital. You know, you struggle a little bit to get everyone on the same message and get that message across an entire kind of world, right, all those different channels. So we challenge ourselves earlier this year to, like, really unify in the best way possible How to do that? And so we did some small things here and here, but we wanted to raise awareness of our contact data product. And so we know b to b can be really boring. We’re a little bored, and we’re like, okay. How do we do something different that’s gonna cut through the noise? And so our product marketing team came to us and said, here’s a theme dump your data provider. Like, Okay. Interesting. Well, I guess it was probably summer of two thousand three, maybe getting into the end of the summer. And I was like, okay. Well, this could go into Valentine’s Day next year, and start ideating. And somehow, and I don’t really know when the leap was made, but we’ve got some really, really creative people. We came up with the concept of a dump your data provider hotline, literally a phone number that’s real. And then we explored and jumped into a nineties aesthetic. And so we actually created a dump your data hotline phone number We have a series of commercials that were shot with a nineties look. It’s so funny. There were so many versions and things went really far. We kinda had to pull back from a little bit, and we were all just having a really good time. And then, yeah, we do get to the point where, like, Wait a minute. Just to your point, is this funny? Is it not? I had a conversation with our legal department because we had so many No. That’s a nice idea. Yeah. So many nineties references. It was like, okay. Those are right. We didn’t directly name a competitor, but we got a closed, and we wanted to make sure. So, like, I had to sweat the legal conversation, and then it was bringing it to other couple of folks. And so everyone was like, this is great. Go for it. And we pushed it out there. And the reaction was Holy kidding. Couldn’t be any better than what he had hoped for. The nineties thing, I think, did it because we’re appealing to buyers who all kinda grew up in that era. Right? Generally, like, these decision makers were probably in their four starts at the beginning of their age and so forth and maybe a little higher. And so they lived through this time. One of our social posts I don’t know, like, sixty comments. It was just huge reach. It was just fun to see, and it definitely we had ads that got comments on LinkedIn, which I don’t think that really happens as well. So it was just it was fun and it was different. And I even said to the team, like, even if we get nothing out of this, You all had a really good time. I kinda did both. And I did both. And I think the point to be made is we were bold. There’s nothing like that out there. Like, let’s be honest. But it’s still the fundamentals of a great campaign. We started with the buyer, know your buyer. We understood that they would appreciate things from a certain era, some of the posts and reposts, by the way, specifically spoke to how I get it. My nostalgia’s kicking in. Like, it’s harkening me back to a time where, you know, I was at my where I was watching infomercials after school at my grandma’s house. So the buyer got it. So it’s about know your buyer, engage with them in the right way, we’re in the places where they are. This is not just a one and done campaign. There’s a phone line. There is quizzes on the website. There’s a webinar. There is ads. There’s so many legs to this, and we’re gonna obviously keep doing it. So it’s still all those same principles, but it’s just flipping it on his head. By the way, there’s data involved. It started with a six sense segment of Which accounts do we really care about? Where do we wanna spend the money? Where do we wanna focus? We have metrics that we’re looking at every week we’re reporting out. So it’s the best of marketing, but it’s just really memorable. Yeah. And we used all the data before we lost our damn minds, which is kinda what I said. Right? It’s just awful. And I feel like now, there’s no going back. Like, if we think about even, like, the smallest campaign or smallest thing, they’re like, okay. Like, how is it gonna be different and funny? And it’s like, okay. You’re gonna do some stuff that’s probably not gonna be that wild and crazy, but it was sort of like, well, how can it be? It’s a fun place to be for sure. It is. And even the best idea and the most unique fun idea, you still got executed to perfection. I mean, how many times have we said that? And that’s what this team does really well. So it it was a cool moment, but again, Vee Bolt cut through the noise really, really kind of theme that emerged throughout all the conversations. Another theme that kinda like relates to that too is there’s fundamental change going on. And whether you’re making a transition in how your marketing team works, how you go to market changes hard. You know, early on, one of our first episodes, we talked to Casey Carey over at Quative, and he talked about the transition to accounting. That and of itself. At the end of the day, like, six cents is we sell an account place marketing platform. It’s change management big time for a lot of companies. Right? And when you get there, the rewards are significant, but it’s hard. And you have to own it and you have to really push it forward. And Casey definitely having done it multiple times, sort of really dropped the knowledge bombs. Yeah. And it was both Casey’s conversation and Alex Ollie from Reachdesk. It was pretty clear from both of them that you have to put your neck out there. Everyone understood the need to make a change to the way that people were running their go to market teams it wasn’t gonna take them to where they wanted to go, and major change was required. And somebody had to raise their hand and say we’re doing it. And that takes guts and that takes confidence, but it also takes rigor and planning and back to execution and In all of those cases, it was a top down decision. There was support put behind budget for technology, but then there was the operational rigor of what is a success metric? How are we gonna measure it? How are we going to bring the team along? And by the way, how long is it gonna take in not gonna be done overnight. And so here’s what we’re gonna try first, and then here’s what we’re gonna do next. And here’s the mistakes we made. It was just the testament to the fact that everyone is going through it. It’s not easy. It’s not overnight change, but you know it’s the right thing to do. And frankly, if you don’t do it, If you’re not making the lead to be more focused and data driven and intelligent about the way you’re approaching the market, guess what everyone around you is. And so the time is is now. Yeah. Thinking about our conversation with Nicole about just AI for revenue teams. Right? Again, like, people are probably up to say, okay, I get it. Ai is a big deal. Like, shut up. But it is such a big deal. It is changed, but I think the thing that I found really interesting and probably the metaphor that, you know, it’s like AI is calling for your jobs. It’s not. I mean, there’s probably maybe there’s some jobs that are just gonna go away. Like, maybe some of the data analysis is just gonna be taken off people’s plate so they can go do the higher value. The it’s looking at the analysis and drawing conclusions and that type. Thing. You remember, like, it used to be you would look at a job, and it would be like, you have to know how to use Microsoft Office and excel. Yeah. Like, no one’s putting that on a job description anymore. Yeah. Like a soft word. Although I still I don’t know how to use word when a document gets longer than, like, twenty pages, like, t l a contents and index and footnotes and and all that. But anyway, use of AI tools is gonna become, like, your Microsoft Office. Like, you have to do your job. It’s going to be a expected that you are going to use some form of me to generate AI tool if it’s something else that hasn’t been invented. But, like, you gotta get on board. Because if you don’t, there’s gonna be fifteen people behind you that are. And that’s a huge change everywhere. Yeah. And you mentioned Nicole, and we talked about Casey and Alex, but I think the people that do, again, embrace the change, drive the change, understand how to bring this revenue team along and really, you know, make that move. There’s so much benefit on the other side, like, personally too. Like, of course, the company benefits, but The skills that you hone in on, Nicole has a whole career right now on AI consulting. We talked to Sam Gong, who’s played roles on the business development side and is now running marketing at Workspan. I mean, the more that you can take a tour or understand the challenges, the problems, across the go to market team, help to fix them, help to implement the right processes. It’s only gonna make you the most desirable employee, the best it’s gonna open up avenues for you, give you opportunities that you wouldn’t have other had if you just kinda stayed in your lane. Yeah. I think you and I can both credit kind of a recent change. And again, not as a commercial for six cents, but both of us having taken a big change in our organization to moving to being account based and all that. And I know for me personally, like, the result of that, the impact had a huge impact on my ability just to be successful in that career, but then move on. And I wouldn’t be working here recording this very podcast right now, but hadn’t taken on that kind of initiative. Yeah. So It also makes you always now be looking for the next thing by the way. I feel like it’s now innate where I’m not just gonna do the things that everyone’s doing or do the same thing that worked last quarter because we always need to be pushing ourselves. And that in itself is a big culture change wherever you end up. Right? Because you start to set those expectations. I feel like Adam, you make fun of me, but I’m always like, how do we make it better? How do we make it the best? Right? Like, it’s just that’s now the standard. Well, I mean, I think that’s me making fun of you is because I’m insecure because I’m thinking myself, yeah, I’m thinking the exact key thing. Or how do you smash the status quo? Because again, like, going back to being bold, like, be bold, it’s more interesting. Right? It makes the day go by. Like, if you’re just sitting there and, you know, you’re pulling the lever doing the same thing quarter after quarter after quarter. Like, there’s no reason why the goal of your organization that getting to those business goals can’t also be something that is paradigm smashing for your career, for yourself, for your team. And, like, your goal of, like, I wanna do this in my career. Can absolutely align with the business goal. They’re not mutually exclusive, and I think it’s an important thing to realize and to to embrace, really. Like, go break some stuff and see what happens. Exactly. No. Innovate, innovate, and test and iterate. And what’s the worst that will happen? You’ll fail, but it’ll quick and move on. And you mentioned it a little bit earlier, but being data driven. And I think I’m going to appeal to your heart right now. Yes. Yes. You’re speaking. But, we talked to so many people that were very, very big, very data driven. You think about qualified and their CRO and, again, talking about how leading revenue teams, having those clear KPIs, the dashboards, all of that, I mean, it’s becoming table stakes to a sense, but It is. It’s table stakes, but the type of data that you can collect. That’s always evolving, always changing. Yeah. Yeah. So I think of two specific episodes. Right? One was, of course, Robert’s episode where he walked us through his dashboard. And one was the first episode that we did. Yeah. Where Christie walked us through her CS dashboard. I obviously have spent most of my career in the analytics side and feel very strongly about it, but what I take away from all of that is You have your dashboards, you have your KPIs, let’s not over complicate it, by the way, nobody’s date is perfect. If you strive for perfection never happen, and it will frankly hinder you from doing something now. Put the stake in the ground, measure consistently have these views that are available to everyone in the organization, one source of truth, centralized, if possible, and then build an operating rhythm around it. Right? Robert was saying he has a really set cadence of his forecast call. The CEO sits on it, by the way. These are things that the data on its own is wonderful, and I’m afraid of data, but Just sitting there, it does nothing. You have to have the cadence and the review cycles. We have a really tight cadence at six cents. Right? We have our biweekly pipeline meetings. Sales is in the room. Marketing is in the room. Operations is in the room. And then we have biweekly meetings where we’re reviewing our ICP. I mean, these are just basic things that You gotta do it, and you have to start now. Let’s not worry about the fortieth way we can calculate marketing influence Yep. Unless we’re actually gonna do something with it. Right? A hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, analysis, paralysis, and just like Oh, we’re gonna capture this. We’re gonna capture that. I don’t know how many times been in a situation where I’ve got data presenting data. And it’s like, great. And then that’s it. And That’s it. You know, obviously, as you get more and more senior in your career, you have the ability to obviously influence change, but change is hard, and change is only possible if you have the data to back it up. Right? Say, like, look. We have to make this change. Here’s why hear the numbers. And it’s not always about the numbers. There’s always the there’s the human factor. Some of the other things, but the data’s gonna get you far. Yeah. Yep. So baseline it, review it, do something with it, please, and then use it to determine the next action. Set really lofty stretch goals for yourself based on what you’re seeing. We’re in the middle of setting up OKRs right now for next year and you better believe it. We’re gonna set some high goals for ourselves but we can only do it because we know what good looks like today. Yeah. Absolutely. I think we just QBR’d. I think we did too. And this was It was pretty good. I mean, I feel like we learned some really important things, some themes emerged, I had a lot of fun doing it with you. We just had each other. We didn’t have a guest. I think we’ll let the audience decide if they want more of just you and I I know. Riffing. Lowest viewer count most, like, abandoned rate of It’s like it’s like you had three downloads who listened for nine seconds each. No. No. I’m feeling good. I think And this is our QBR. We’ll send it to the board. We are done. So in our next sort of set of of episodes, we’ve got some really exciting stuff. We’re gonna revisit that transition to account based. We’re gonna talk about that change and talk to practitioners. Right? We’ve spent a lot of time with leadership, and now we wanna get into it. And really talk to the people that are creating strategy, but also pulling the levers at the same time. So I’m super excited that they kinda to dig in on those things. Lots of good stuff to come. Do we just what package up this podcast and send it to the board? I think we do. We’re done. And you know what? So everyone out there, you can use it too. This is your QBR. Just send it off and be like, There it is. Simon Adam handled it. Alright. Well, thanks, Adam. Thank you. You’ve been listening to revenue makers. Do you have a revenue project you were asked to execute that had wild success? Share your story with us at six cents dot com slash revenue. We might just ask you to come on the show. And if you don’t wanna miss the next episode, be sure to follow along on your favorite podcast