“My advice is to shift to what really CRO is meant for.” – Rolly Keenan in today’s Tip 850
How do you switch from isolation and bulldozing to a revenue domino effect?
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Tegrita
The Revenue Takeover
CMO to CRO on Twitter
Tegrita on LinkedIn
CMO to CRO Book
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Rolly Keenan. Rolly is a serial entrepreneur who splits his time between Chicago and Colorado. He’s the key growth specialist at Tegrita as their CRO. Rolly brings 20 years of leading growth at the likes of LinkedIn, Oracle, Gallup, and the US Olympic Volleyball Team. Here he is:
Rolly Keenan: I wanted to talk to you about the switch as a CRO, the switch from isolation and bulldozing to a revenue domino effect. So from a sales perspective, historically, when you’ve got a strong sales team, I would consider that situation is isolation and bulldozing, meaning that team is isolated. They’ve got sales goals that work to at any means, necessary to find a deal, close a deal. You know, in the middle of those two things, you get what they need to move a deal forward and they bulldoze how they need to. In other words, a sales team might demand something from marketing or bulldoze through if they’re supposed to follow a particular set of instructions to reach out, I need to use this template or I need you to go from this database or I need you to contact these leads by a certain time. The sales team might in isolation and bulldozing, just kind of plow through that and say, “Well, we’re not doing that,” or “I’m isolated from you, so you may be saying that, but I’m simply listening to my manager.” And that managers listen to their director and that directors are listening to a sales leader.
So moving from that to kind of a revenue domino effect, meaning what marketing does affects your sales conversation and what support does affects all your future conversations with that client. Customer success does affects the expansion or share of wallet kind of work that you’re doing with those clients. And now in a revenue model on a CRO led model in sales. Now you’re leading that group of talent as a domino in a series of things that are happening for revenue.
So as a CRO, don’t act as if purely your sphere of influence has grown. So now I’m a CRO, I’ve got success and support field sales, inside sales and I just have a bigger sphere of influence. Don’t look at it like that. Look at it as if, now you’re leading from the front and explaining an entirely new way of thinking about revenue, which includes sales.
So it’s a paradigm shift of revenue generation where there’s a group of specifically talented people in sales, their talents that are very different from those who support, those in marketing. These are different people and they have their role in a spot that is very much intertwined with what everyone else is doing before and after their interaction with the customer. And when you think of it that way, your goals are still there for sales. You still have your revenue targets and deal size goals or product up-sell or whatever it might be for whatever kind of business that you’re in. The goals are still there, but those goals are intertwined with what marketing is doing.
Marketing is doing something with the brand or doing something with the way that they’re doing email marketing or advertising that is lending itself to when a conversation finally happens in sales that you’re feeling like you’re having to inflate your deal size because a potential client, this prospect is just not ready for that because that’s not what they thought. And there are other interactions then that’s a conversation on the spot, in that day between those teams of like, let’s talk about what’s going on in marketing.
This is not an alignment like we want to be aligned with marketing or customer success. This is intertwining what you’re doing. And that’s a big shift. And my advice to Chief Revenue Officers when it comes to sales, particularly when that CRO has a lot of life career experience leading sales teams because their mode of operation is generally going to be isolation and bulldozing. And I’m throwing a bit of a negative connotation on those words. But we all know, I know some of the biggest software firms in particular right now are still operating in 100 % isolation and bulldozing mode because there can be success there. But as a CRO, this is a big change. And this is my advice is to shift to what really CRO is meant for.
Scott Ingram: For more about Rolly, and for a link to his brand new book: CMO to CRO. Just click over to DailySales.Tips/850.
Once you’ve done that. Be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!