Marketing’s Role in Acquisitions

If you look across tech, almost no matter what the size of the companies are or anything else, ultimately you’re gonna get down to one company brand. Then it becomes how do you navigate the change? One of the key factors on being able to complete that, you know, merger of those two brands is tied to the website. So now you’re starting to get into, well, why don’t we just merge the brands together even if we wanted to? I don’t think it’s a good idea because you need to condition the market and bring the market along. This is Revenue Makers, the podcast by six cents investigating successful revenue strategies that pushed companies ahead. Hey, everybody. So it’s a little bit of an interesting day here at Revenue Makers. I am missing my cohost. Saima is off doing what she does so well, presenting to customers and prospects, talking about what Sixth Sense does and extolling the ways that we we go to market. So you’ve got just me, but we’ve got a really great episode. I spoke to Randy Littleson who is a CMO of SalesLoft. He’s got a great background, multiple CMO gigs, been acquired, done acquisitions, buying, selling, all sorts of different things across the spectrum. And we’re really gonna dig in today on marketing’s role in m and a. We’re gonna talk about SalesLoft’s acquisition of Drift, kind of what happened, and then talking about things like, how do you bring brands together? The systems integration. How do you think about generating demand? How all those things sort of culminate into creating, which is essentially a brand new company. So Randy had some really great insights, some really great actionable tips for everyone. So there’s a lot to dig into here, so let’s get started. Well, Randy, appreciate you, joining today. Looking forward to this one for a while. So I am Solo, I mentioned that earlier. Here I am alone, so hopefully I don’t completely fall over myself without Saima, but we will work our way through. So I kinda wanted to start with you joined SalesLoft at a really interesting time. That’s stupid. You can say stupid. Well I’ll explain that what I mean by that. Acquisition and I always wanna get into the role that marketing plays. I think that’s a great topic in any you could write a textbook people could write textbooks on that. But come and just walk us through you came in, acquisition, just that whole chaos, I guess, we could call it a little bit. Yeah. That’s why I jokingly said stupid. Right? It’s obviously a great time to be at SalesLoft, but for me personally so joined at the beginning of November, immediately get into Thanksgiving, Christmas, holidays, and everything. We’re going through our annual planning process. We’re on the February first fiscal year, February to January. And then it gets discussed obviously in a small circle that we’re planning to acquire Drift. Head to New York for an off-site where we bring together the leadership teams from both Drift and SalesLoft. This is in January. And starting to plan all the details. Right? Do due diligence, which we can talk through and everything. So, yeah, it was not the best timing, just figuring out which way ends up, you know, learning the team, learning the business, everything else, and then you throw this in. And it was all gearing towards our annual kickoff, sales kickoff revenue kickoff, middle of February, where we announced it the first day of our kickoff internally and externally at the same time. So lots of things going on there. Obviously, one of the big things leading up to everything was the due diligence process. And so part of that off-site planning was both a combination of due diligence as well as planning for day one and the immediate days afterwards in that. So from a due diligence perspective, it’s interesting because I’ve done quite a few acquisitions in the past. I have been involved in several of these things, and I think there’s a lot of things that you need to think through from a due diligence perspective. Right? And not only to make sure that you make a smart decision from an acquisition perspective, but also to facilitate all the planning you need to do from an execution perspective going forward. And so we were looking at people’s, the various roles they had on their team, what their comp was, what the various levels were, and everything else. We took a look at contracts. What existing agreements did you have in place? Right? What systems did you have in place? What’s committed? What’s budgeted, but not yet committed? And understanding that so you could figure out what your flexibility was. Obviously, taking a look at the budget. Systems, huge piece of it. Both of us are both partners and customers of six cents, for example. So we had to look at where we had redundant systems and how those were gonna come together. We had to look at where each company may have a unique system to solve a problem that, hey, we weren’t using that, but maybe we could or should going forward. Competitive intelligence, making sure that we understood the business, who the competitors were, what the strengths, weaknesses were, all that type of stuff. Customers, understanding how many customers, How did they break down by verticals, by segments? Where was their intersection and overlap with the customers that we had and all that? Understanding personas. Who did they sell to and market to? Who did we sell and market to? Brand, messaging, and on. So a lot of things going on in the first three to four months to say the least. Yeah. Trial by fire, I guess. Right? But, again, having done it so many times, you probably had some level I don’t wanna say level of comfort, but, like, you know, you’ve seen this movie before. It’s a little bit different. But Yeah. I think you learn sort of some of the basics in that. And and it’s interesting. So over the years, we did an acquisition many years ago where my company got acquired, and they brought in McKinsey to lead a very formal process. I was designated as the executive from our side to help lead it with an executive from their side. So I’ve seen sort of that very formal third party helping to navigate through all the planning. And then I’ve seen companies do it one hundred percent internally. The investors get varying degrees of involvement. So, yeah, I think you sort of learn having done a couple of these basics in that, but, obviously, every situation is different as well. When you look at it from a marketing perspective too. Right? Because, again, like, there was that moment and in terms of when’s within the organization’s ticket. We have our platform. We’re solving these challenges. We know that we have a bigger vision and how Drift could fit into that. So were you kind of involved in what’s the grand vision now of, like, okay, we’re gonna bring these two platforms together? I mean, SalesLoft is obviously very well established. Everyone sort of knows and continues to evolve what it does, Drift as well. But, like, what’s the sort of ultimate, we’re gonna solve this when we bring these things together that envisioned the acquisition itself? Yeah. Good question. And, you know, what was also interesting about that is we also spent a bunch of time on what we’re not going to do. So if you look at SalesLoft historically as being the sales tech space, right, Drift is more on the marketing tech side. This was deliberately not a move fully into the MarTech space. That was not our intention. But what we did feel was, if you look at what SalesLoft is doing and where we’ve evolved over the years, right, we’re helping sales organizations, revenue teams, engage with their buyers in a thoughtful, value added way. And the ultimate goal is to give them the tools so that they can prioritize and take actions at any point in time that are going to advance deals towards more closed won opportunities driving revenue. And our viewpoint was, this won’t come as a surprise to you guys because I’ve seen Carrie’s research and your guys’ research and Gartner and Forster and everybody else, right, is that buying process has got a lot harder. There’s more people in the buying committee. There is the sales engagement that’s going on, but there’s a a whole lot of digital engagement going on as well. And so our view on bringing Drift in was to really connect those two worlds a little bit better. We’ve all seen sales and marketing not necessarily aligned at all organizations. And one of the things I talk to marketing people about quite a bit is, look, the worst thing in the world from a marketing perspective is you do all this great stuff and it doesn’t get followed up on. That’s the thing that kills all of us. Right? And so our viewpoint was is if we can connect this digital world with the sales engagement world in everything that we’re doing, we can ultimately help people achieve their outcomes better. And, fundamentally, that’s what we’re all about. Can we help you more consistently, first of the integrations between them. So if somebody’s on your website, first of the integrations between them. So if somebody’s on your website, Drift is going to understand what that buyer’s looking for, what their intent is, what they’re looking for on your website, feed that directly into SalesLoft, and tee up a follow-up by your app. And in fact, it’s gonna use GenAI to automatically come up with what that first message should be based on knowledge about what they were looking at and what the chat dialogue was about. And it’s all about driving action. Right? How can we help drive action on the quest to get more predictable and consistent revenue performance? Yeah. I mean, the question later about AI, I’m sure we’ll go into that again because we can’t have a podcast asking about AI at this point. But And we’ve certainly got AI in both of the product. Yeah. Talk about, like, the actual art. So the acquisition pen to paper is signed. Let’s think about brand level stuff. Two separate brands. There’s transition points. We’d kinda love to hear your thought process about how on all those acquisitions that you’ve done and how you think about bringing two brands together. It’s tricky one for sure. In fact, I met my very first conversation when very few people were in the know. I met with the leader on the Drift marketing side, and I started the conversation with, I’ve been in your shoes before. I know how excruciatingly painful this can be. Because from a marketing perspective, it’s your baby. Right? It’s your brand and everything. So my general feeling is, with very few exceptions, if you look across tech, almost no matter what the size of the companies are or anything else, ultimately you’re going to get down to one company brand. It’s very few companies that are going to be juggling. Even, you know, in an SAP or an IBM or whatever, they may have a longer runway to get there, but that’s ultimately what they’re getting towards. So, you know, that was our strategy as well. And then it becomes, how do you navigate the change? So that was what we signal to the marketplace right away. Drift is one of those interesting companies that has both the product and the company name are the same. That’s a blessing and a curse in my mind. There’s good news, bad news associated with that. But our strategy was, you know, eventually, this is gonna be one company sales loft. The product name Drift will live on indefinitely. We’re not getting rid of the product. We’re investing in it. We’re integrating it. It’s core to what we’re doing. And so then how do you navigate that transition? And so we started off on day one, and it’s still to this day, it says drift to sales off company. And so we started to condition the marketplace that it’s now a part of the sales loft organization, and that’ll eventually evolve into its one company. And the product will continue on as Drift. So it’s a SalesLoft product called Drift. Interestingly enough, one of the key factors on being able to complete that, you know, merger of those two brands, if you will, where Drift becomes part of a sales loft fully, is tied to the website because it’s one of the most visual incarnations of the brand itself. And as any marketer knows, it’s not just the website, it’s the website and all the systems that are systems that are connected to that website. So now you’re starting to get into, well, why don’t we just merge the brands together? Even if we wanted to, I don’t think it’s a good idea because you need to condition the market and bring the market along to do it too quickly. So you need to implementation issues relative to the website and the systems that have to be resolved. And so we’re actively working on all those in order to facilitate that next step. Anything, I guess, in your past acquisitions, we won’t talk about this one because you’re still in the midst of this, anything that has gone in let’s just say even in the overall integration process, maybe in the brand that’s gone horribly wrong or horribly right, maybe just sort of, like, cautionary tales to look at, or it could be like, hey. Really do this. It’s gonna work well. It doesn’t have to be all negative, certainly. There’s a couple of things that I think are key. Right? Especially for software companies. The people are everything. It’s always this perception that if you’re the company acquiring, it’s the people being acquired that are all nervous in the risk. That’s not true at all. People on both sides of the equation are nervous and uncertain. But it’s interesting the psychology of the two groups, right? But at the end of the day, there’s people that are nervous on both sides, And so don’t fall into the trap of, one, ignoring the people, or, two, assuming that one group of people is fine because they’re the ones doing the acquiring. That’s not true at all. They’re as nervous as anybody else. So, look, throughout this process, there are times that you don’t know all the answers. Being transparent and honest with people is really important. Don’t just give them an answer because you want them to have an answer right now if you don’t know, because if you end up being wrong on that because you were, you know, over your skis and trying to just satisfy them, boy, I’ll tell you that backfire is even worse than telling them, look, I don’t know yet, but give us about two weeks and then we’ll know. I think that started a lot. Like, in this particular case, our CEO, David O’Brien, did a great job. We did day one. We did all hands for both Drift and SalesLoft employees, and the level of transparency and honesty says, look. There are some things that we don’t know yet. Here’s what we are planning. Here’s what we’re not planning and everything helped a lot. So I think people is really, really, really important in that transparency and how you communicate and you lay out a plan and you get to certainty as quickly as you can, but don’t force certainty if you don’t have it yet is really important. I’d say another thing that’s really important too is just the communications externally as well. It is so important to be buttoned up and consistent, and that starts with internal communications, enabling and get everybody on the same page. Because the last thing in the world you want is when people start asking questions, it could be a partner, it could be a customer, it customer. It could be a prospect. They start asking questions and you’re completely inconsistent in your answers. So I think the coordination of the communications is really important. So we spent a lot of time. Right? We had FAQs and we had emails that went out. We had internal messages and that. That review process to ensure that the answers were consistent, the messages were consistent across all those audiences in the different communications is really important. And where I’ve seen it go bad is where you have trip ups there, where you have inconsistencies there, where, you know, well, hold on a second. That’s not what so and so said. Okay. Now you’re starting to spiral and get into problems. Plus, like, the nuances of language and even punctuation. It is very true. Because, again, I’ll go back to the people side of it. Everybody’s on edge. It just introduces uncertainty. And I told a lot of people during this process having gone through this before. I said, you know, if there’s one thing I’ve learned going through these before is they rarely go in a straight line, and patience is a virtue. If you believe in the ultimate vision of what the company could become, take a deep breath and give it some time. If you don’t like it, okay, that’s one thing. But if you like sort of, okay, I like this, okay, it’s introduced a little uncertainty for me personally, but I like the vision of where this is going and what the company could do and the market that we’re in and everything else. Take a deep breath, give it a little time, and let things unfold a little bit. You don’t know every answer on day one. You don’t know every answer on day thirty. That’s not the way this works. So patience is a virtue. Give it a little time, let things unfold a little bit, give it a chance to breathe a little bit. And if you do that, a lot of times it creates great opportunities for people, but a lot of people don’t give it the time to let that unfold before them and figure out where they can take advantage of those opportunities. A lot of people just click in this. They’re thinking, oh, where’s my job? Self survival? What’s gonna happen? And just anxiety. It’s like unknown. Yeah. Because we all do need to worry about that stuff at the end of the day. But I have found time and time again, these can create some great opportunities. And you know what? If it doesn’t turn out to be that opportunity, you can leave in sixty days from now. You don’t need to leave day one. You don’t need to shut it off. Give it a chance because it can create some great opportunities. Teams usually get bigger. They get different roles. They get a little more diverse. All of a sudden, you got a new product line that you could get involved in and and learn in in different ways. There’s usually a lot of opportunities come, but you gotta give it a little bit of time. Time. Alright. So you make it you get this thing. You’re transitioning. I don’t say transition, but you’re transitioning. If you put your marketing hat back on, basically, you’re going from a single product company to a multiproduct, to a platform, you know, whatever the term is. From your perspective, how are you starting to think about how I’m actually gonna generate demand now that I’m a multiproduct company? There’s there I’m sure you’ve got various stages of a road map for integration. Maybe in the future, is it always two products? But how do you think about that? Because you have a demand engine, but now the demand engine’s gonna have to change. Yeah. So our first principle was don’t break what’s already in flight. And believe it or not, that’s really important to say because immediately people’s reaction is, okay. We gotta stop and do something different. And the reality was for both the drift and the sales loss side was keep doing what you’re doing. We’re not gonna have on day one every one of those questions answered. So keep doing what you’re doing while we continue to learn, get the teams assimilated, start to figure this out. Right? The next thing that comes up immediately is ICP and personas. I just listened to your guys’ ICP session, which was very, very good, by the way. We’re not so crazy as doing it every two weeks, but nonetheless, it’s a good practice. I like the mindset that you guys espouse, right? It’s good stuff. So, but we started to think about that too, right? Which is who are we selling to? Actually, in terms of accounts and geos and stuff like that, there’s more similarities. The personas is a little bit more unique because Drift obviously is more to the marketing persona. SalesLoft is more to the sales. An interesting persona that keeps coming up in all this is the role of rev ops and how rev ops provides a glue between those, right? And so that’s that’s our third persona that’s really important to us that we talk a lot to RevOps because they’re that bridge between the two groups. They’re driving a lot of the operational, the system stuff, and everything else. So that was a big part of it. Gotta look at the system side of it again. Right? We’ve gotta get to a merged CRM system. We’ve gotta get to a merge we’re working with your team, for example. So we’re gonna have a single instance of sixth sense, but then looking at the models. Do the models need to be different? Right? And things like that. So all of that stuff went into the equation as the teams are starting to get to know each other, as we’re starting to figure out operationally how we’re going to execute different campaigns. All of those things were sort of working in parallel, if you will. And so that’s an ongoing process. It hasn’t been that many months yet, and it’s still ongoing. But those are some of the things that we’ve been taking a look at in how we continue to generate demand. And so far, knock on wood, things are going well as we continue to execute, and we’ll see, like you said, the product strategy will dictate some of this going forward as well. Packaging pricing will dictate some of this going forward as well. But right now, we’ve got two parallel paths going with increasing synergies between them, And then that’ll continue to evolve with time. Okay. So let’s go back to AI now. Right? So certainly, there’s not a five second period that goes by. There’s probably a new product that’s launched in the last five minutes since we’re talking. Because, obviously, we like to ask just, what do you think GenAI’s impact is, will continue to be? I mean, again, like, there’s so many things out there now, like, the pretty standard, I guess, at this point, use cases for it in marketing. But, like, what’s your view on it for your team, for yourself, and where you see it going? And then we can kinda talk about, like, how that kind of goes into sort of product side as well. I absolutely love it. I think it is a force multiplier. I think it is an efficiency productivity boost when everybody is struggling to do more with less. You know, one of the great things that I’ve always watched with marketing teams, no matter where I’ve been, is marketing teams are always on this quest to keep doing more and more stuff like content, for example. And and I always ask the teams to look around because there’s so much leverage in the stuff we’ve already created, but we don’t find ways. We think we have to generate more. We get on this hamster wheel of more. We’re using AI technology for videos, for example, that helps us get full leverage out of the videos that we create. So we did a keynote at one of our recent SalesLov on tour events, and now how can we turn that into lots of different videos that we can leverage in different ways in a very cost effective, efficient process. AI is interesting, and I think it’s true for sales and marketing and just in general. Right? I look at AI as AI can either raise the floor or it can raise the ceiling or both. I actually think it’s gonna raise the floor more so than it’s gonna raise the ceiling. I’ll take this in the sales context. Every sales organization have their rock stars that are hitting better than hundred percent quota every single time. I’m not sure AI gives them as big of a lift as it is if you take the masses that maybe are at at sixty, seventy, eighty percent of quota, could it raise the floor and get them to be more predictable, consistent performers in that? I actually think the benefits there and the numbers are bigger as well. So the lift that you get is huge. So I’m a huge believer in AI in terms of ideation, standard use cases where it can be an aid to you, sort of be that co pilot that’s helping you out in how you generate content. I just think it’s huge, and we’re exploring all of that within our organization and trying to take advantage of that. I think anybody that’s not doing that, I think is getting behind quickly. I think that adage is true, right, that in the short term, I don’t think AI is significantly replacing people. The people that understand AI are the ones that are going to replace you. That’s XDR role and you look at some basic qualification in that, I think AI can definitely take over some basic aspects of that, but I don’t think it’s replacing humans anytime soon. There are situation after situation where the human involvement and the relationship building is so important to the way b two b selling is. But I think AI can play a huge role. It’s gonna standardize and automate some of the routine. You know, it’s a compliment. It’s a huge compliment. I spent five years in the call center space, and call center technology is, quite frankly, way beyond where sales and marketing are in terms of looking at chat bots and that because it’s all about deflection, right? I want to try to solve as many support cases before I get to an agent as possible in that. And, you know, one of the key takeaways I had from that experience is anytime you peanut butter spread any technology to try to automate and mass things, it usually produces a pretty brutally bad user experience. We’ve all called into a call center and gotten the this call may be recorded, the IVR tree that says press one for this, two for this. And when those things are over implemented and try to solve too many use cases, we usually are hitting with absolute force the button to try to get to an agent. Right? Incursating and Yeah. I don’t know how I’m screaming agent, agent, and, like, it’s just sort of, like, escalating anger. So I I think that’s a great illustration of that technology can be value add if deployed appropriately and not try to over deploy it too quickly. And I think it’s the same as we look at in sales and marketing. There are gonna be use cases if you prove out a use case, get value from it, and then move on to the the second, but don’t try to peanut butter spread and apply it to everything in mass without humans involved and everything. You’re just gonna create a terrible output and a terrible user experience. It’s funny if you look at, like, just search in general right now. Like, search is in this this complete and utter chaos. It’s like, create use AI generated content. Don’t use AI generated content. We’re gonna use AI in search. It’s in a situation of just, like, pick a lane and figure out what’s gonna work. I think it’s created just so much bad experience. It’s wonky. No one really knows where things are going. I think that’s just an example of a market that’s trying to catch up. It’s a tool that can be deployed. I’ll give you a scenario. Right? We talked about the acquisition and that. Our revised ELT had an off-site right after the acquisition, so we have some DRIFT members on there, and we had worked with our broader senior leadership team to get inputs. And then at the off-site, we’re looking at our company values on that. After an acquisition, how can we take them and get them situated to where we wanna be over the next couple of years and and learn from the good stuff that Drift had and weave those in and everything else? As we are sitting there at an off-site, some of us were on chat GPT and getting ideas of how to word things and that. We never took one of them verbatim and that, but it was ideation as we tried to craft the wording exactly right of how we want to articulate our values and that going forward as a combined entity in that. So it can play a role. I’m a big believer in its value from an efficiency and execution perspective, but, boy, I’ll tell you, don’t peanut butter spread it. You’re gonna get into lots of trouble, and don’t take the human out of the process. Yeah. Definitely. So now you got you’re sitting sitting in a really interesting spot. Right? Because talking to so many sales teams, now marketing teams, when you think about challenges, I think going back, we’ve talked a lot about the XDR role, a lot of folks, different leaders, where that’s going. As you’re kind of going through this process now, are you gleaning insights of yeah. These are, like, those particular use cases now that we should be focusing on in the platform with an AI twist? Like, we can definitely use AI to solve for this while probably staying away from, like, this is human. This is always gonna be human. Do you have and, again, like, inputs into product road map and so forth? Like, I guess, when we just start with, like, what are the pain points you think that AI could specifically solve for? And, of course, you’re not driving or developing the product roadmap yourself, but I’m sure you’re hearing a lot of this from your customers. So I’d be curious to kinda hear what where you think it’s headed there. It’s pretty broad. If you think about the platform that we have, you know, it’s pretty broad. It’s creating the transcripts from the conversations that you’re having and gleaning insights from them in that. It’s yeah. I mentioned the Drift integration. It’s GenAI to automatically create that message that based on the context and the understanding in that to automatically send it out. It can be pretty broad across. I think the market is still figuring out exactly the human and the the AI in that, but I think our general principle goes back to what I said before. Right? AI is an assist. Never recommend taking the eye and automatically sending it in that, but it can be an assist. It can automate the mundane stuff in many cases, and it can be an assist in some of the things that you need to send out. So when it comes to summarizing a call and identifying the key moments within a call discussion that you had, it’s great for stuff like that. And so we’re looking at AI in terms of also making recommendations on prioritization of things that you should be doing. If you think about a b two b seller today, we expect sellers to be managing top of funnel, mid of funnel, bottom funnel, all at the same time. And you go back to what we talked about earlier, right, with growing, buying groups and and all that type of stuff. It’s really hard. You got a lot of balls that you’re juggling in that. So we’re leveraging AI in order to be able to make prioritizations of the things that you should be doing for every opportunity that you’re engaged with no matter top of funnel, middle, bottom of funnel. What are the next things that you should be doing in order to advance that in order to get towards a close. We’re also going to be coming out in the fall with some AI that’s going to be starting to take a look at across all your opportunities, what are those insights that we can glean, those winning patterns that we can start to understand? Well, what are the best practices? And then comparing every opportunity that you’ve got in get to get to more predictable and consistent performance in that. So it’s pretty diverse. It’s across the board. And our general viewpoint is, is if we can automate the mundane stuff and we can help generate and glean insights from the stuff that you’re doing, that’s a great application that gives the assist to the rep, who is ultimately the navigator and the the one orchestrating everything that needs to happen in order to close business. Yeah. No. It makes a lot of sense. The aggregation of data. Right? I think to me, like, this fast analysis of being able to look at hundreds, thousands of data points, you know, call recordings, emails, opportunities. Like, we do a lot of that with sixth sense in our product, understanding, like, who’s the market, the right fit, and all that. But there’s so many opportunities there just to give that that’s the brain, right, that’s gonna help the navigator. I think that’s a kind of a good way to describe what you said. Like, they’re the navigator and, like, give them all the information they need to chart the best course, but it’s still a human charted course. It’s exactly right. In fact, we talk a lot about the data is one of the differentiators. Data space has been a little littered over the last couple of years. And the space historically started with a bunch of disparate products that are all now coming together in platforms and that. But unfortunately, a lot of the insights that had been gleaned over the years, like, you know, on this call, you talk fifty one percent of the time I talk, I’m not sure how actionable that is. Right? But it’s interesting, I guess. And so, one, how can you get all the data in one place? And then how can you draw the right conclusions from it? And by the way, part of the data that we’re looking at is not just within the conversations and within the system, but we want third party signals coming in. So like a signal coming from 6sense that drives action in terms of the follow-up directly is a great signal to have. You know, we work with, like, UserGems, for example. UserGems tracks if you’re the champion at my customer and you leave to go someplace else, well, that should trigger two actions. Right? I need a new champion at my current customer, and guess what? I’ve got an opportunity now where you just went to. And so bringing in all these third party signals along with first party signals that we get through Drift and stuff like that on your website, and then believe it or not, as we continue to go upmarket, boy, I’ll tell you, the more you talk to enterprises, the more they’ve got ideas of internal signals from their own internal proprietary systems and processes that they want woven in to this fabric as well, that you create this very rich set of data and you can start to make very smart recommendations based on those winning patterns that really drive more consistent predict We’ll go back to, again, AI can either raise the ceiling or raise the floor. If we get a system that has all of that data and all of that knowledge and can apply AI to it to really make prioritized recommendations as to what everybody should be doing given the profile of each opportunity at any one point in time, we’re gonna raise the floor and get to much more predictable, consistent performance across the board. And at the end of the day, that’s what every company wants. Right? How do I get more predictable, consistent revenue And that’s fundamentally what we’re focused on. Well, we could keep going because I had a ton of great questions. But we have a question that we like to ask to our folks on the podcast, which is, what is the most ridiculous thing that you’ve ever had to do in your career or been asked to do in your career? And it could be ridiculously negative or it could be ridiculously positive because we’ve gotten some really good answers that were, that’s ridiculous, but, wow, how great was that? Well, I don’t know if it’s the most ridiculous thing in the world, but it was tied to an acquisition. So many, many years ago, I will leave names out of this discussion as well, we were being merged, acquired. It was almost equals, but probably being acquired by another company. I was chartered as the executive to lead this integration. I was the first one to fly down to where their headquarters was and meet with them and met with the CEO of the company. And at the time, talk about poor communication, it was not a hundred percent clear and evident as to which CEO was gonna be the ultimate one in the driver’s seat. This CEO proceeded to take me in his car into his private gated community and show me around what life could be like if I move there, and then proceeded to tell me that I had forty eight hours to decide if me and my family were gonna move down there and become a yeah. Thank you. Good reaction. Same reaction I had. Right? To move my family down there and become part of the management organization was going to look like or anything else. And that one still sticks out, and it is tied to the M and A topic that we’ve been talking about today. And needless to say, I found a way to wiggle out of that one and not have to pick up and move within forty eight hours. Wow. It was like, all of this can be yours, but do it now. It was a very strange way of trying to sell it. Very strange. So That’s wild. I think that qualifies pretty good, so I’ll I’ll take that one. Well, Randy, I appreciate it. We went a little bit long, but great insights on the m and a process and marketing and AI, all the good stuff. So really appreciate your time, and thanks so much for joining. Thanks, Adam. Appreciate it. 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, and we might just ask you to come on the show. And if you don’t wanna miss the next episode, be be sure to follow along on your favorite podcast app.