Navigating the Transition to Account-Based Revenue

For a lot of sales teams who are used to getting leads to work with such a different mindset shift, and I underestimated it, honestly, like, I’m kinda, like, This is the best thing ever. It’s the biggest no brainer since no brainers. Right? Like, why wouldn’t you do this? And just to kinda see the resistance to change. It’s like, alright. This is change management problem. It’s not a data technology problem. This is revenue makers. The podcast by six cents, investigating successful revenue strategies that pushed companies ahead. Oh, Adam. Are you ready for today’s episode? Oh, I am. So who do we have in Hassi today? We are gonna be joined Kc Carey, CMO of Quaniv. Quaniv is a SaaS company providing a platform to connect your OKRs to business performance. Kasey’s background is incredible, by the way. He’s got multiple CMO gigs at some really amazing companies. Along with some time and some smaller, less known companies like Google and Adobe, you know. Casey’s also very involved with our CMO coffee talk community at six cents. Well, so we’re gonna dig into a topic that could not be any more near and dear to our hearts here at success, which is really the the transition to an account based strategy. As is the theme of our podcast, it’s not just sales, it’s not just marketing. It’s an entire organizational shift, and he’s been there multiple times. They’re really excited to begin. Love it. Super actionable. I’m sure. Something tells me this is gonna be so good. And when we’re done, we’ll walk away with some really amazing and actionable insights. Game on. Alright. Simon, here we are again. We are back. Another episode. Super and I say this every time, but here I am excited yet again. I’m always excited, but we have a really, really, really great guest with us today. Casey Carey is gonna talk about account based, which a little bit near and dear to our hearts here at six cents, Casey. So thanks so much for joining us. Really appreciate it. Sure. So I think we’re gonna just dive right in. And I think we’ll start I don’t wanna say elementary or maybe it’s elementary because I think a lot of people could describe account based marketing, account based sales, account based revenue, I guess from your perspective, how would you describe an account based strategy from the beginning? Yeah. Very question. Obviously, lots of people have opined on this. I think the main difference is you start with the account. Right? In classic lead gen, you’re probably looking at leads or contacts and Maybe you work into an account more broadly, but often it’s a one and done type of motion. Accountbase really forces you to think about who the most important accounts and then who are the people within those accounts that make sense for you to put your messages in front of and engage with. So a lot of the tactics are the same. I think it’s just a different strategy or a different approach. And clearly, there’s strategic approaches. There’s velocity approaches. You know, there’s a lot of variations on account based marketing and probably the traditionalist would say it’s more strategic than velocity. That’s fine. But, yeah, so it’s putting a starting with accounts and then working from there from a campaign perspective. Yeah. Makes sense. And I like what you said there. I mean, I think it truly can run the gamut of more transactional commercial type accounts all the way up to strategic. I mean, it’s six cents. We apply an account based approach at scale, whether it’s doing one to one programs or one to many, many accounts. And so what would you say, Casey, have been some of the key benefits that you’ve seen transitioning to an account based revenue model? Yeah. And the obvious one is you’re starting with an ICP. And, you know, a a set of accounts, whether it’s ten or ten thousand that you have decided are your most important accounts. And you’re putting programs against those. Right? So I think just that targeting and a natural outcome of that. If you agree with sales on the ICP, now we’ve got alignment. Like, we’ve all been marketers forever, and One of our favorite things is, you know, sales saying quit sending us the wrong accounts. Right? And it’s like, but we agreed on those accounts. So it forces that conversation, and I I think that’s a huge value and benefit that comes out of it. Yeah. How do you go about getting that alignment? I mean, and it’s a very easy thing to say. I mean, we’re we’ve got a lot of companies coming up on annual planning for the next year, how should we even start? It was one of the first things I took on in my current role. There was no alignment. Honestly, marketing was doing their thing. Sales was doing their thing. They were both pissed off at each other. It was, you know, kinda classic situation. So I’ve sat down with the sales leadership and forced the conversation. And it was a hard conversation because Often sales doesn’t want to close the aperture. And they they don’t wanna lose the possibility And I have as many opportunities as possible. Right? And then I just said, I can’t target everybody. I can’t I don’t have enough money. I don’t have enough people. I don’t have enough time. Who should I spend my money on? Right? And so just having them be okay, particularly with, we’re not saying that somebody comes in the door that’s not in our ICPA, we’re not gonna try and close them. Right? Like, we will always be opportunistic. Within reason. But if we’re gonna focus our time and effort, let’s agree to what those are. And we’ve gotten there even we’re doing our planning now. As you mentioned, and I sent a slack to our chief revenue officer and said, this is who we’re currently targeting. Still agree or disagree. And she took some countries out. We made some changes on industry focus and a few other things. So Once it’s there, like, and you agree, then it just becomes a basis for continued decision making. In some of these conversations, there may be other companies need to have the conversation about do you find that sales is holding the the concept of a lead still kind of, like, holy? Like, we want leads. I know you said they don’t wanna miss any opportunities, but has that saying, okay. We’re moving away from that. Has that been a big part of it too or just ultimately, you know, the targeting and the ICP? Where’s your big I don’t say struggle, but where’s the biggest, yeah, struggle or challenge really been? Yeah. Oh my god. Like, the lead is not dead. I’m sorry. Not trouble. It’s hard to say that. They still love their leads. What can’t we get hundreds more handraisers? I’m like, I would love to have that happen. No. It would drive down my car significantly. If I could do that, I’m working on it. But, yeah, I mean, one of the things that I think really helped us was Just pushing that mindset of, hey, this isn’t a person who we think might be interested. This is an account who looks like the rest of our customers who’s showing sufficient intent that we should invest our time and effort. Your job is to actually build out an account engagement strategy. Right. So it’s no longer, like, I’m gonna run a six team step sequence against this person. It’s okay. Here’s my target personas. Here’s the I really need to go after. There’s some people on the periphery that I wanna stay in front of, and really get them to think about strategic selling into an account with marketing supporting it. And that was that’s a big mindset shift. And I would say maybe two thirds of our sales team are, like, fully embraced in there. We still have the ones who I go look at kind of the account, you know, I’ll reach and what’s happening on accounts, what level of engagement is, etcetera. And there’s times where I’m just like, that’s all we did. Uh-oh. They had sales leaderships bought into it. So fortunately, they’ve put in place account engagement scores. So they’d look at the book of accounts and look at the level of activity, number of contacts, number of engaged contacts, etcetera. And Basically, you can’t turn an account back in until you’ve fully worked it. And the account engagement score kind of enforces that mindset. Nice. Just to close out the topic of kind of the definition and alignment, I feel, you know, just some really tangible takeaways for the audience. What sorts of criteria are you including in that ICP? And I heard you mention country. I heard you mention industry. But just, you know, if you could rattle a couple of them. Yeah. I think ICP means a lot of different things to different people. Some people go as far as including persona and behavior data in an ICP. We stop at FIT. This company has the technographics that look like our customers. So we draw a pretty hard line. And then we have separate personas, target personas, and then separate intent data. Right? You put all those three things together, Here’s your priority accounts that you should go after. Some people look at that entire thing. A great kind of anecdote on the alignment We’re seeing a lot of activity in Middle East, at least prior to the current situation. And, yeah, one day I looked and I saw Saudi Arabia is the second highest traffic chart website over in the US. I’m like, how is that even possible? Right? So I would look. I’m like, yeah, it’s real. Right? So I reached out to the sales team, and they’re like, oh, yeah. Okay. I was on fire in the Middle East. Everybody’s talking about them. Everybody’s conferences. Like, this is big deal. One of the things we realized is we exclude government and education from our ICP, because you get a lot of students, and you just get people who don’t have money to software. So we’d agreed to what we realized in the Middle East, often the government and the institutions and businesses are the same. They’re highly connected. So, you know, within the Middle East, we’re going to add a government and education back into the ICP to support that. So is great that it kind of forces those types of analysis and conversations to make sure that alignment occurs. Yeah. And it’s a great point about iterating on that definition. Right? It it’s almost equally important to understand. Okay. Where is additional demand, even opportunities or revenue coming from outside of this definition, and does that mean every six months we need to refund. Yeah. And even I think, like, if you see something, you know, say something almost like, And and similarly, like, we had India in our ICP. We saw a lot of activity in India, but nothing was turning in the deals. And so we got to the point where we’re like, okay. We’re gonna pull back on the idea, and it was the right move. Yeah. But he said something about if you see something, say something, but have you sort of employed a Do you have, like I said, okay. Every quarter, we sit down and we look at it, or is it really just opportunistic? We’re looking at the data and say, okay. This clearly calls for us to make a change on the ICP. Or do you have have you sort of processitized? Is that a prositize? Is that a word? Yeah. We actually run a weekly sales and marketing leadership meeting. And so these conversations are usually on the agenda for that meeting. And they tend to be from some very tactical ones, and we’re removing this field from our forms, and here’s the impact on the BDR team to, hey, we’re spending a ton of money in India, not seeing any deals over the last six months. What do you wanna do? Right. So I love that. And we weren’t gonna go there yet, but I think the strategy is one thing. The alignment almost does have to continue to be I don’t wanna use the word forced, but you need to have a forum to be removing some of the silos between sales and marketing. And so you mentioned you have a weekly meeting who’s in the meeting and who runs the meeting. Absolutely. And we use the term interlock just to kind of force that life here’s why we’re here. Right? Yeah. It is to raise issues, make decisions and agree. So it’s ran by our head of Rev ops What makes sense? Interestingly, like, a lot of the issues are coming to do with our technology or reports and things like that. So he runs it. He reports into our CRO. Got the CRO. We’ve got our theater leaders who are basically vice presidents of sales, North America, Europe Asia. Myself and then my head of demand gen, are in that meeting. Oh, and, and the leader of the BDR team. So enough seniority in the room to make these decisions then, which is, I think, an important point. Yeah. Yeah. We it’s interesting. We tried those two levels down. And it was not successful. Partly personalities, partly just didn’t feel like they had the authority. And so is kinda like. Alright. I agreed with our CRO. We’ve got numerous issues. Let’s figure out a mechanism so that we could get these result and and move much more quickly. So and the question we talked about getting, obviously, getting sales in there on board. I had some experience there earlier in my career, maybe not long ago, maybe six, seven years ago. Trying to get the board on board in the sense of I was it was I had just started a company. I walked into my first board meeting And we were, you know, it was still early days, but at the end of the meeting, there was, or he’d been around for a long time. He pulled out his first gen iPad, you know, that broken screen and a picture of a lead literally had the funnel on it. He’s like, I need to see this, this, and this. And I was like, okay, interesting. Have you sort of dealt with, you know, obviously getting further up on board, or do you think we’re at a point now where Boards are kind of the get it. They get this approach is how they’re gonna be successful. I think it’s a mixed bag in my previous role at Kazoo. I still remember telling the board that Michael is to drive m q l’s to zero, and at the same time increase the pipeline. And they’re like, what? How? How does that work? Like, alright. I’ll explain it to you. Trust me, and we’ll get there. And we did it. We went to, almost soon. We had hand razors and six QAs. That was our demand model. Here’s been a little bit more complicated. They’re we have huge addiction to paid media, and driving MQLs, driving form complaints, and MQLs, and the BDR team making the calls, and just the classic lead gen model. The economics are tough. It doesn’t scale. I and it’s gotten worse over the last three or four years. Like, the performance just keeps decreasing. She said, okay. And I’d started to make the shift, and I really hadn’t honestly socialized it high enough. In parks, I didn’t think they would want it to understand it. But literally, like, a year ago, I almost got fired for moving budget away from our MQL programs into six QA programs. So, yeah, I got I got yelled at. So kinda reset on that and kinda have go on this education kind of campaign and get everybody up to speed and Yes. So it’s not just the board. Our CRO was totally on board. It was the CEO and our chief strategy officer. It was unfortunate timing. Right? Like, it was q three of last year, and market demand went down significantly. At the same time, we were making these changes. So it wasn’t the market. It was our fault, but it turned out to be the market. Yeah. I think all in all. So long story short, we kinda have three motions. We have an MQL motion. We have a demand gen motion, which is basically six QA and then we’ve got a self serve motion, which is free in trial sign ups that we qualify for upsell opportunities. I would still love to shift more off the MQL plate into the other plates, still working on that, but that’s kind of the model that we currently have in place. That’s, I think, the whole point of this conversation is it is a journey. It doesn’t happen overnight. And as long as you’ve got this north star that you’re working towards, and you are communicating it effectively and all those things, right, then I think, you know, you can show success. You mentioned this a little bit. Right? You had to go on a roadshow. You had to continue to socialize it. Outside of that, how has the role of the CMO evolved in the context of account based revenue? Like what sorts of responsibility skills things have you had to do just to make sure that this model is widely used. I would say it’s interesting. Right? Like, I unfortunately have a science, engineering background. So data and models don’t scare me. A big part of my job has been educating people on the end models. You wish I could just say, like, trust me it works, and that doesn’t happen. In fact, I had salespeople proactively trying to prove the model wrong. Stop. Because they know better. Possible. Actually, you know, like, but, oh, good for you. But literally, like, yeah, like, hey, I saw this thing, and so six QA’s don’t worry. It comes like, oh, okay. Right. So we’re not believing it. And and here’s, like, a really good example. So it’s not too much of a stretch to think that people who are researching or thinking about remote and hybrid work models may also be interested in OKRs and other types of goal management, because it turns out if people aren’t in the office together, you have spend more time, making sure they have goals and are delivering them being held accountable. Right? So but without fail, At least once a week, I’d get somebody like, why are we marketing to people who are searching for remote work? I was like, Look, if it’s important in the model, like, the model will decide. Right? If it’s not important, either way, you don’t have to worry about that. Would you have worry about is, is if it’s a six QA and should you be working or not, but they’re, like, returning six QAs because one of the key words that came up was remote work. I was just like, swimming upstream against those kinds of things quite often. And then I actually went on a roadshow of I called it, the quote of foster sessions, explaining customer lookalike models, explaining intent data, explaining buying stage models, showing them how they can leverage, keywords and making their outreach more relevant, how to think about target personas and just going through. And literally, I think for a lot of sales teams who are used to getting leads to work, it’s such a different mindset shift. And and I underestimated it honestly. Like, I’m kinda, like, this is the best thing ever. It’s the biggest no brainer since no brainers. Right? Like, why wouldn’t you do this? And just to kinda see the resistance to change, just like, alright. This is actually a change management problem. It’s not a data technology problem. We’re still working on it, but, yeah, we’re made progress, sir. Curious, like, when you talk about, you know, that I always say, like, to customers, crawl, walk, run, in terms of, like, this the journey and all that. And you said you’ve got you sort of those three models. Right? You’ve got the the the qualified account model. You’ve got the m q l model, and you have your, sort of, your, your free PLG model. Is there a lot of crossover in the sense that are you informing your free sign ups or the MQL is getting informed by some of the account bait. Like, how how are those things kind of intersecting? Because I would imagine you’re not running so very separate lanes without them coming together in some form. Huge overlap between the three of them. Huge overlap. And it creates an optimization problem, right, because ideally, we wouldn’t be investing in all three to get one opportunity, but, you know, that happens. Right? So we looked at of all the opportunities open over a period of time, how many of those opportunities created self serve or trial accounts? Turns out a bunch of them. Right? People wanna experience the product. And we’d be having a great mechanism to do that, and they take advantage of it. We still need to drive kind of that model and traffic and four week actives. And because ultimately, there’s a maturity curve where people are gonna use the product and then pay for the product. Right? So we’ve what I tried to do was say, like, look, we’re not gonna major success on the number of accounts that become qualified sales opportunities. We’re gonna measure success on four week actives. Right? And that’s why that exists, but we’re gonna get qualified opportunities that’s icing on the cake. So, okay, stop that conversation. And then it turns out, like, a high percentage of our six QAs are also MQLs. And a lot of the MQL scoring activity is the same activity that the six sense model is looking at. So we flag every NIMQL and six cents as, you know, it’s in buying stage. It’s like, oh, model works. Right. And it just shows that we’re actually generating demand. Right? We’re not capturing why So, anyway, yeah, to your point, there’s a lot of overlap over that. And I’ve just gotten everybody to be okay with it. Like, yes, we’re double counting. Right? Like, we’ve got sixty opportunities from here and forty seven from here. Guess what? You know, if we turn one or the other off, it would be somewhere in between those two. Right? Yep. So because we kinda went there. Yep. Can we talk about how the metrics changed when you went from an inbound MQL model to diversifying into the six QA, which just for the listeners, I will say a six QA is a six cents qualified account. Which essentially means that an account has shown enough intent that it really is ready to be passed to sellers. Exactly. So we We basically manage three three funnels. We have metrics for three funnels, particularly for the the six QA funnel We’re looking at account reach. So back to the alignment, we’ve defined our serviceable obtainable market. It’s a set of accounts, you know, fairly fixed number of accounts that we spend money against to try and help generate demand. And so we look at percent reached of the song, percent of accounts engaged, and level of engagement. And then ultimately, what percent of those end up on the website. So those programs are looking at opportunities created or pipeline. We’re looking at message in front of those accounts and then our how much engagement are we creating within those accounts and optimizing for that. So and My demand gen leader is very, you know, he comes from the MQO world. Right? And it was taking a while for him to let that go. Right? He’s like, oh, but we didn’t create any opportunities. Like, I don’t care. I do not care. What’s the level of engagement? That’s all I care about. Right? And those ultimately come handraisers, they become MQLs. Like, they’ll fall through. I have total confidence in that. And so optimize for the engagement, don’t optimize for form summits or hand raisers. When thinking about, like, so we’re talking about, like, getting these accounts engaged, you know, whether, you know, where you are now or previous roles, can you think of was there and this is, I guess, a loaded question. A campaign, an account based campaign. I’m gonna put a quotation thing around. Something that you executed that was wildly successful, really successful in terms of just gonna be driving that account engagement up really high. Maybe it was created, you know, watch more pipeline than other programs. Something you could point to that’s like, man, I mean, we need to recreate that every day because it was just so, you know, so impactful. Yeah. So we found that with functional role campaigns. So we did a CIO campaign. CIO being a placeholder for a senior technology leader. You know, we would go BP down, but, you know, it’s a classic playbook of Learn what their pains are, put together some content, connect it to the solution, create the landing pages and the assets, and the ads, give the BDRs, the right outreach stuff, in context, and just really focus within the Psalm, you know, let’s go after these personas. With that strategy, we’re seeing really, really good results. Like, trying to can’t think of any of the numbers off top of my head, but really good results. I mean, the challenge is content. Right? So we’ve been, like, every quarter we choke through a function. Right? We do have done chief strategy officers. We’ve done chiefs of staff within CIO. And we actually started with the highest level of content engagement on our website. So we’re looking at, like, okay, CIO is one of our most popular pieces of content. Let’s go ahead and build out a full journey campaign for CIOs. I’m just kinda working out it that way. I’m chucking down the list. So it seemed to work well in the past. I ran, like, a credit union campaign. You know, five hundred eighty credit unions in the US could it go after, not that expensive to go after that small number of accounts but saw a really high performance off the other side. Yeah. And the beauty of this approach is you’re tailoring the content based on what you know is resonating with them, right, what keywords that are interested in, what existing content is resonating, like you said, that CIO page. Right? You’re just building on that. But oftentimes in the b to b side in particular. Like, we tend to assume that these folks are getting a very curated experience on the B2C side of their life already. Right? They’re demanding it and frankly expecting it at this point from their B2B interactions too. And so it really is a challenge for us as marketers to be curating that journey for them and to be giving them that personalized view of what we know is a pain point for them in solving it and and giving them all that information as opposed to the traditional sort of one size fits all. Yeah. I think if you look at my inbox, I would say most of b to b marketing is not very relevant. Yeah. It’s pretty bad. But you’re right. It it takes work and effort, but the results are there. And it’s the gift that keeps giving. Right? Like, it’s not like, hey. Let’s run this campaign from this quarter do something else. So it’s like, no, that campaign is an evergreen campaign now. We may update the content. We may update some of the targeting, but That is an evergreen campaign that we will continue to run and monitor performance of gaps. Okay. Now let’s do another one of those. And I think that’s how you create compounding effect over time. I think to your point, I think too often as marketers, we get bored, come up with this great idea. We do all this work. We put it in market a quarter later. We’re like, okay, let’s do something else. Right? And It’s not how it works. Like, you really need to just it’s building blocks that you’re building on top of continually either there’s an optimization loop on it or it’s like another but you gotta continually do that. And almost think of it as it’s a portfolio of investments, and you keep placing bets and you keep optimizing your bets. And, sometimes you gotta curate some mobile. I’m gonna take them out, but you’re just managing a portfolio of investments over time. Yeah. I mean, we’re definitely marketers are definitely guilty of shiny objects syndrome all the time. Like, oh, what’s next in the event? Just, you know, like, you gotta keep your eyes on the prize. For sure. Yeah. Oh, we should be running an AI campaign. It’s like, oh, god. Okay. Alright. See, everybody else. Okay. Yeah. So cautionary tales. Right? You’ve gone through this process multiple times. You know, what would you say to somebody? Like, either sitting in your sitting in your chair, you know, running a software company trying to make this transition. Things that use, like, don’t do this. I went down this path and didn’t go well. Clearly, you already said one because you is for us to leave. But anything else that, you’d really wanna put out there to anyone that’s listening thinking through this process? Yes. I think when I mentioned this, It’s a change management process. Right? So start there. Like, there’s plenty of proven models on how do you manage organizational change, and you gotta think about it that way. I mean, like I said, me as a marketer and, like, understanding how this stuff works and what the potential is is kinda, like, why would you not do this right now? Right? Like, I’m not gonna spend my time convincing you should because it’s so obvious, but that’s not how it works. Right? So really thinking about it that way, identifying some champions, like, we always do this. You know, I’ve got two or three people who every time and love these stories, right, like, oh, this count six Q Aid. Three days later, they came as a hand raiser. Two days after that, we got an open opportunity. It’s moving fast. Right? It’s just like, though, get those success stories out there. People wanna be part of the team that’s winning. Right? So just kinda create that momentum as part of that. The two things we did that were game changers for us. We moved to a dynamic book model for sales. And the basis of the dynamic books is now six QAs. Before that, they could pick their own accounts or they could pick six overworked six QAs or whatever they wanted to do. Right? And There was an uphill battle to get them to work six QAs. But at the same time, at any point in time, we had a thousand six QAs not being worked. And so anytime somebody would complain about pipeline, I would remind them that there was More than double our current pipeline generation going on worked. Makes me cry. Oh gosh. Right. Yeah. So she’s kinda like, I I’m handing it to you on a plowerer. Like, let me help you take advantage of it. Right? And so finding the people who wanna who really wanna take advantage of that and create that success, and then just building on that momentum worked pretty well. Nice. And then, of course, I I love the sharing your success stories, really building that momentum, planning out where to start, how to show those early successes, and then hopefully, you know, everyone will get on board. What role would you say technology place in the execution of an account based strategy? That’s what she was it creates a lot of complexity. Right. And there’s still some gaps in the technology, I think, that are kinda hold people back. Just without question the right way to do it. But now it’s just much more complicated. Some of these accounts, we’ve got upwards of a hundred, target personas, and an account. That they’re trying to trying to work. Right? And so you start getting into, like, are these people in the US or that you’re up, like, where’s the interest coming from? And can I focus in on that? And are these the right personas? And, you know, one of the things we really struggled with is you know, in the ideal world, the sales team would be like, tell me who to call and what to say to them. Right? And we’re kinda in the I can tell you what you count you should focus on, I can tell you the personas that you may wanna outreach and the things that they’re interested in, but you’re gonna need to connect all the dots. Right? And I think some of our sales people struggle with that complexity of trying to connect all those dots. So either they just don’t do it, or they kind of just do the same thing for everybody. And then those who are really thinking about it strategically are the ones who connect the dots, get the right person, always get some relevant messaging, going in their outreach sequences, and start building, you know, a map of the out and start working each of the opportunities within it. So, yeah, in fact, I could wave a magic wand, it would be taking a very well thought out persona map, the six QA account, and handing them all the contacts with kind of the value of messages for each one. Like, if I could automate that process, I would be a hero, but a lot of lot of them struggle with that right now. It’s just it’s complex. It’s a hard problem. Sure. Yeah. It is. There’s so many companies that understand the value of an account based approach. But they’re hesitating to make that transition. Right? There’s like this, oh, our data’s not great. Or, like, there’s always a reason. Right? What would you say to those folks? Yeah. Who understand, like, they’re sold on the concept, but they’re just hesitant to make sense. Yeah. My favorite response, really. Is what’s the alternative. Right? I’ve got something that’s better than kind of anything else you’re gonna do. It’s not perfect. It’s not even close to perfect. But it’s markedly better. So you could randomly pick counts and try and contact people. Or you could take accounts that look like our best customers and that we think are in market for what we sell. Which one would you like to eat? And often they’re like, okay. I’ll do it. We thought. Right. Right. They still don’t like the answer, but it’s like, alright. That’s a better answer than the other alternatives. Okay. I’ll do it. So that seems to work. You’ve always got the skeptics. What’s the famous box quote? All models are wrong, but some are useful. In b to b, pretty much all the data is wrong, but some of it’s useful. It’s just getting people to understand that, like, This is better, and it’s gonna get you farther faster. It will never be perfect if we all need to be okay with that. It’s just the way it is, and they know that. They are like, oh, but you got this magic box. It should all be perfect. It’s like, no. No. I’m sorry. Yeah. So I’ve gotta put in the work. Yep. So we have a regular question or segment that we ask everyone. Sure. To to kinda line us out here towards the end. So What is the most ridiculous thing that you’ve been asked to do in any role? Whether positive or negative. So Give you an example, we had we had one guest who was told to sunset an entire product three days out and just say, oh, you gotta shut down until our entire customer base. Or someone else that was told to hire an entire enterprise sales team in three weeks. So anything crazy out there? The outcome could be positive. The outcome could be disastrous. So my boss, not to be named. He got excited about this idea of basically creating a BDR bot. So he wanted to automate taking six QAs. Scraping the contacts where we could get that data for a target set of personas, automating the outreach sequences, I’m basically building an automated machine to work six QAs. And maybe even beyond six QAs. Right? Like, we’re gonna the consideration, we could go into ISP week. Like, we could open the aperture. Right? And the ridiculous part was, don’t tell anybody in sales. You’re working on this. Mhmm. Secret. Secret. Right? It’s like, oh, I’ve spent all this time and effort creating such a great relationship and alignment with the sales organization, and now you want me to, like I mean, it was if you read between the lines, he didn’t believe sales was doing their job and he wanted me to do their job for them, but not tell them I was gonna do it for them. Well, you did have a thousand on work succeed. So it’s not for you. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that’s actually where the idea started. But it kinda spun out of control. Fortunately, I did a lot of work on that, including we’ve got a in house team that whose remit is to use technology and AI to improve our business processes, which is such an amazing thing to have. I can just point them at a problem and they’ll go solve it for me. They help solve some of the take a persona map and go get me all the contacts problems. Which was pretty interesting. But fortunately, I ended up not having to put it in production and roll it out. So That’s a good one. It’s a good one. I will say though, Casey, we do that. Yeah. I know. I I took a look. And so leave it or not. I took a look at yeah, ten per yeah. Ten percent of our pipeline is being generated through this autonomous AI assist. Yeah. No. I I don’t think it’s a bad idea. Ben done well. Yeah. I don’t think it’s a bad idea. Like I said, particularly for On on work six QAs or even other accounts, like, nobody’s touching them. So who cares? Right? Like, let’s go work them. And if we get ten percent out of it, that’s awesome. That’s ten percent more than I had. So, yeah, I think, conceptually, it’s a great idea. I think the the hard part was tried to, like, replace the sales team. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t think it’s a replacement to your point. It’s an augmentation. Of what what can what do they not have capacity for? Let’s make sure. Yeah. And they should do about it. It would be good to share. Yeah. That’s not gonna help. It was a political chore and I was the pawn. Yeah. Well, this has been great. Really appreciate it. I know we we ran long on this, but is a a great topic near and dear to I’m sure all of us. And so, Casey, really, really appreciate your time today. There’s there’s actionable insights Up the Wazoo here. So, hopefully, everyone that’s listening is is taking heavy notes or you can obviously hit the replay button. So, again, thanks so much for joining us. Really appreciate it. Yeah. My pleasure. Thank you for asking me, and any questions anybody has to be able to feel free to reach out to me. 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. 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