How Misaligned Software Metrics Ruined B2B Sales and How to Fix It with MK Marsden

MK Marsden Podcast Transcript Warren Zenna: So why don't you let everybody know who M.K. Marsden is? Who are you, and what do you do, and what is it that you're up to right now, and what are you trying to accomplish within the area that you operate in?

MK Marsden: Yeah, cool. Thanks for this. So I started my career in sales and marketing, but I went to school wanting to be a vet and ended up in computer science. Warren Zenna: Okay.

MK Marsden: So, you know, we can talk about that some other day. But, MK Marsden: really what I've always been focused on is how do we use technology to better serve customers? Go to the customer, figure out what their business problem is, help them out, use tech, take care of your employees next, because they're the interface to your customer. So I started in IT software, built a couple of companies there.

Got to be part of the leadership of a big, big company, Novell, the precursor to the internet. Then I went into MarTech. I was like, "Let's see how people use all these tools we create." And I created transactional email 'cause it was like, "Hey, if we know what you just ordered and we know where we're shipping it, we could sell you more stuff and take better care of you.

We could use password reset as a marketing channel." So kind of created all of that, sold that to Acxiom, had a great run there. And then I started looking at it and realized right before COVID, buying and selling in B2B was getting super complicated. And with digital marketing, buyers knew everything about the sellers, and were starting to make decisions without talking to the salespeople.

Then boom, we get hit with COVID and suddenly buying changes completely. Procurement is no longer in charge. People are working from home. People are new to companies.

They don't even know what their buying process is, and sellers are really in trouble. So in the last three years, 80% of sales reps have missed quota. Now you talk about this. I think salespeople are just canaries in the coal mine of what you've been talking about.

Is your business and is your growth sales-enabled? Are you CRO-ready? Are you... So all the CEOs are running around and saying, "We want growth, we want growth," but they don't know what that means and what to invest in and what technologies they need to actually achieve that.

So last year, I created a platform, a sales intelligence platform that reads everything about the seller's account MK Marsden: to show them what's going on in real time in that account, so they can navigate it properly, sell to the right people at the right time, or not sell to them because they're not buying, or not sell to them because it doesn't fit with their business problem or their tech stack. So we launched Sales Sleuth in March, and we've got sellers selling, and they're no longer flying blind.

They can see what's going on in each account. So that's what I'm up Warren Zenna: Okay, gotcha. Look, I got it. So, yeah, let's dig into that a bit.

Interesting. So, look, I agree that buyers are, I wouldn't say smarter than they used to. That's not necessarily the case. I think they have more access to data, so they're more, let's say more informed, I guess.

I don't even know the right word. MK Marsden: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Warren Zenna: Or they're more...

You know, they could diagnose things long before they ever have to get onto a call or anything with a salesperson. And in fact, I think they want to more now. Like, it's not just like, "Oh, I can," I just want to 'cause I don't wanna talk to anybody. I think people are overwhelmed with too many different ways they are being communicated with.

I mean, every time you buy anything, you start getting emails from whoever you buy. It doesn't matter if it's soap or butter, you get emails from them. It's insane. So people are almost reluctant to ever buy anything from a direct website anymore.

I'd rather go to Amazon 'cause I know I'm not gonna get emails about everything. And that's killing people's businesses. I find it amazing that people don't understand this. Like, why would you put something on an email list?

You know, that thing you get every time you wanna buy something is like, "Give us your email, save 15%." I'd give you 15% more just to not send me emails, 'cause I know that's what's gonna happen. So to me, I just don't get it. Like, I'm very perplexed by the mentality behind these sort of things and that no one's figured it out.

And I think mainly, I suspect it's either, A, it's just laziness, like it's what we always do, is just leave it running. Or the other part of it is also, what else are we gonna do? Like, we have no other way to talk to people 'cause no one wants to talk to us, so this is the only way we can get people in our database. It's kind of crazy, but I think there's definitely sort of a desperation.

And I think this relationship between the buyer and the seller has created a chasm for only a certain segment, though, of salespeople. Because what you and I are talking about right now, a salesperson wouldn't even be involved. It would be like a product-led thing where I'm just dealing with a machine and I'm determining how do I interact with it. But if a person gets involved, now the problem I'm seeing, I can tell you for me, if I'm looking at like a software solution, I'm probably first talking to a robot, MK Marsden: Mm-hmm.

Warren Zenna: and the robot passes it over to probably some, let's call it like an SDR person who's getting flagged that this person's qualified 'cause this human being wrote back and said they wanna talk. So that SDR gets on the phone with me, and then maybe they do some research on me and they find, "Ooh, this is a big fish. Let's bring on somebody else too." So now there's two people on the phone, and I'm like, "Who the - I just wanna talk to - I thought I was talking to Steve.

Who's Bob?" You know? And then I'm already thinking, "Okay, so now I'm in a funnel, and I don't wanna be in a funnel. I'm not interested in being in a funnel.

I wanna be - whether I wanna buy this or not." So the whole thing is completely broken because companies need to measure every single thing to make sure that it's this and that. But then look, on the other side of the equation, I get it. I know what it's like.

I mean, if I'm deploying people and I want them to build a pipeline, I do want them only to be talking to people who really wanna buy something, and I really do want them to qualify people. So there's this battle between measurement and impact and efficiency, and then the other side is the customer. I don't really know how the wrangling of this is, and I would be interested in your point of view on what could be done about this, 'cause I think we're at a point where it's reaching critical mass.

MK Marsden: Yeah, I agree with you. So I think where we made the mistake is when we made things cheap. See, cheap lets people do crappy work. So we made email cheap, so we started doing crappy emails.

Remember when you used to print four-color brochures and you had postage attached to it, and you knew who you were mailing to? Like it mattered, right? Now it doesn't matter. A robot can send noise out all day long for .

001 penny on it. And so that's what brands are doing. That's what companies are doing. What I always say to my customers is, "When was the last time you opened an email from someone you didn't know or took a phone call on a number you didn't recognize?

Okay, well, if you're not doing it, why do you think they will?" Right? So like, stop. My first request is everybody just stop the noise so we can actually see what's going on.

You and I have done a couple of things together that I think are significant. I don't think we have the answer, Warren. I think we're working together, you and I and others, to come up with the answer. But your CRO roundtables, I think are a really important part.

I think education. Look, some people think marketing is SEO. No, SEO is SEO. Marketing is a much larger discipline, and sales isn't marketing.

Sales signals are different than marketing signals. Like we've just thrown everything into this ratatouille. We both did roundtables with Mike Falato where we bring people together and we talk about what's working, what's not working. Discovery is still critical to causing connection and being able to figure out if you're gonna work together or not work together, if it makes any sense.

So yes, you as a buyer can sit there and read everything, but if you don't talk to a human being on the other side, you can't really figure out how this is gonna fit, how it's going into your org, who else needs to be involved in the decisioning, right? And what we're seeing is in all this chaos, 70% of the time the decision is no decision. So I don't know from a tech standpoint precisely what we have to do. My approach was, since the buyer knows everything about the seller, let me at least tell the seller everything about the buyer.

Okay, so now the intelligence gap is covered. We're on an equal playing field, so that when you do get the first phone call, it's not to the SDR and it's not "Hi, howdy," right? It's like, "Hey, I know that you've got an RFP for this, and I know you're the influencer and you've got these other people." So you can treat the person with respect.

You've got context for the phone call. Now you can engage in a person-to-person way around solving. So that's the part that we focused on. We also talked to our customers about talking to their customers.

They sell them a solution. The customer's using 10%. Help them use some other portion. Help them use 40%, 50%, 60%.

Sell them into the white space. Companies are filled with agencies. They got too many people, too many platforms. I've got an app for every function I do.

We can't operate efficiently that way. So go in, solve a bigger portion of the problem, integrate with what they already have. But for me, knowledge and insights was critical to the first step of being able to create an intelligent relationship between buyer and seller. Warren Zenna: Hey, everyone.

I wanna thank you again for listening. I get great comments across LinkedIn and other channels about the show, and it's really gratifying to see that we're having an impact on you. Another thing I wanted to let everybody know is that we also produce events. About two and a half years ago, we started these CRO roundtables, predicated on the idea that...

Well, two premises. One is CROs are looking for other CROs to talk to, which is really true. It's a very lonely job. And how do we get a bunch of CROs in a room where they're not being disintermediated by panel discussions and sponsorship events and demos and stuff, and really give them a chance to talk to each other?

So we created a roundtable event that is essentially that. It's a three-and-a-half, four-hour discussion between 20 and 30 chief revenue officers, and these are amazing events. The format took off. People love them, and I get requests all the time as to, "When is your next CRO event?"

So to that end, I just wanna let y'all know that we have a number of roundtables coming up over next year, over the next, like, 2026. And I wanna share them with you so you can, if they're in your market, you can come. So the next one we're having is gonna be in London, actually, in February. February 24th in London.

So if you happen to be a chief revenue officer in the UK or even in Europe and you wanna come by, you'll be hearing about it more on my website and LinkedIn. But throw it on your calendar. And then following that, we're probably gonna be doing an event in San Francisco in March. There's gonna be one in New York in March.

I'm gonna do another one in Chicago, probably in April. And then I'm gonna do an event in Boston. I'll do an event in Atlanta. I'm gonna do an event in Salt Lake City.

I'm gonna do an event in Austin, and I'm gonna do an event in Los Angeles or the Southern California area. So those dates are to be determined, but they'll be going across all next year and these events are taking on huge momentum. They're the place to be if you're a chief revenue officer and you want to be in a room with no interruptions and have an opportunity to really share with each other in a private and confidential, open discussion about everything that you wanna talk about as a chief revenue officer and collaborate with great people.

So thank you and thanks for supporting the show and I look forward to seeing you at the events. Bye. Warren Zenna: Yeah, I understood. I would say the complexity around this whole thing is that there's a lot of different types of sales motions, right?

You've got product-led, which is human beings not really involved at all. Maybe it'll escalate at some point if maybe a increased number of users on a platform. And I don't even know if we're even doing seats anymore. Now it's more tokenization and outcome-driven stuff.

So that's a whole different thing. And then the other thing too is, if you're selling a service or a software that has a service, like maybe it's some complex onboarding or customization protocol that's required once the purchase is made, an integration layer, yeah, you do have to get people involved. But that's usually now at a point where the customer's already sort of been identified for having that conversation. You're pretty deep into it, and you're probably onto something.

I'm saying before that. The issue I'm seeing right now, and again, we're talking pretty broadly. Are we talking here about selling software? Are we talking about selling services?

Are we talking about selling products? Like these words are thrown around a lot, but they matter because the way people buy things depends upon what they're buying. So I think when you're talking about, I would think this, I think this is the case. If you're talking about salespeople who you're supporting, you don't need them unless there's some complexity to the sale that requires a human discussion, right?

You can't just do it over the internet. It means someone has to be spoken to, someone has to understand things. Probably means there's some complexity. Also means there's probably a price barrier, probably expensive enough so that it needs approvals or a certain budgeting permission.

So, a salesperson needs to be involved. Maybe there's some complexity to the offering, so there needs some explanation. You need some sort of a sales engineering person involved who can explain things. There might be a competitive thing involved where there's three other choices I have, and I want to talk to this company and tell me why yours are different, 'cause your marketing materials sort of do it, but I want to ask some questions.

But in order to get to all these points, there needs to be some signal that the seller can indicate that this is someone whom not only is a fit, like the ICP, normal crap, like okay, yes, they have the right budget and they have the right job, blah, blah. More importantly is that there's a certain, real granular specificity around the pain that they have right now, and the need they have right now, and the urgency they have right now, and their circumstances. Those are difficult things to predict.

But what I'm seeing is, and I have a couple of colleagues who are doing this right now, I think I might have mentioned this to you, who are really good at being able to reversing this whole thing and researching databases to determine things where there was a real pain point on the horizon that you could point to, and you can reach out to somebody and point to that pain point and say, "Look, X is about to happen to your business, and here's the evidence of that, and we could do something about it."

And I think this is the future. I think that the way we're able to now triangulate data across certain verticals, particularly verticalization around vertically oriented businesses, not horizontally oriented businesses. You can go, like you and I talked about this, right? You go after a specific industry that has a specific set of pain points and a very specific niche, and determine what are the three or four buying signals within that niche that people make a decision?

Like why do they make a change in their this or a change in their that? And then being able to identify that. And I do think we're gonna get a great deal more precise in the way that we operate as opposed to general, which is let's just send emails out to as many people as possible and capture the 20 of them who will say yes. I think those days are coming to an end, and I mean, this is a really big change because if I'm running a pipeline and I need to know that I have this huge TAM and I have all this outbound, I just think those things are sort of becoming MK Marsden: Oh, I agree with you.

I agree with you 100%. So in our environment, I'm really glad that you're distinguishing this. It's a complex buying environment with a complex selling environment. That's where we focus, Warren Zenna: Okay.

Is there a specific one you're focusing on? MK Marsden: Well, you know, I talked to you right over dinner, and we're gonna look at medical device, med tech, and one of the ones that we've been really successful in is when a company is kind of going from charismatic leader sales, zero to 20 million, 30 million, they get their money, now they have to convert into a legitimate sales system. We do really, really well there 'cause we get them. They're young, they're smart, they're focused, they don't have the bad habits, and so we can show them.

And you're right. But what we've found is we can read the signals. The buyers are telling you all day long what they're buying, and they're telling you by who they're hiring on LinkedIn and Glassdoor and with their recruiters, and what blogs they're reading, what events they're attending, and what commentary they're writing, and what videos they're... We wrote the reader that says, "Okay, these 184 points and the CEO's statement here and the CFO's statement there combined means they're gonna buy these types of things," and then we monitor them.

So, "Oh, here's an RFI that's come out. Oh, they've just attended Adobe Summit. Oh, they're doing this, they're doing that, they're doing this. Oh, they're at this hospital show."

All of those signals are out there for the buyers like, "Hey, these are all the things I'm doing." When you read all that and then bring it down to, "Am I a fit?" That is your discovery call right there. It's just we've handled it all because it's all in the digi-sphere.

But yeah, I wanna go into, you know, I think the challenge we have in the software industry, and it's where I grew up, is everything is soft, right? I wanna go into the people who build the thing, that sell the thing, to a person who uses the thing, and that relationship exists versus this soft, Warren Zenna: Yeah, software is a bit soft and fuzzy, and it changes too much, and we're in this time right now where nobody wants to make a long-term commitment to any software because it'll change, like, in six months, and maybe we'll build it ourselves.

It's a really weird time for that. I think if you're in the software business, it's a weird time to build something. I think if you're a small business and you have the ability to become fluent with some of the new tools, you can build something pretty quickly and get it out there. But I think you always have the danger that someone's just gonna come and grab it, or that it's gonna become another feature in Anthropic's library, and you can just do it that way.

But you're right. I mean, if you're selling complex, really like radiology machines and MRI machines, I mean, those things are not going anywhere. I think the data that they produce will be read by these systems, but the process of collecting it is still gonna be someone has to get inside of a tube and get, you know, it has to happen that way. It's probably, we're a long way off where someone's gonna wave a wand over your body and get that information.

I think it's still gonna be expensive, complex machinery, and hospital groups and physicians and emergency system organizations and ER groups. I think these are always gonna be needing really complex things that are coming out of these companies. I think those types of transactions are gonna be really important to navigate because there's a relationship there. It's a big purchase.

It's complex. There's a lot of wheeling and dealing and negotiating that's going on. There's procurement involved. There's a lot of different factors, innovations and this, that, and the other thing.

So I see those areas where there's always gonna be opportunities for sales to become a very important and maintain a very important component of the process. But they're diminishing, and I think it's interesting to talk about that, you know? MK Marsden: Yeah. And I wanna touch on something that you said, right?

The small business person can do it themselves. Like, look, you've been at this a long time, and you're a Warren Zenna: Too long. MK Marsden: guy, and you know how hard it is. So Warren Zenna: really difficult MK Marsden: Joe and Susie Six-Pack, God bless them, right?

Like, they can't do it themselves. And so they end up, you know, the nephew or they buy some crappy piece of software, then they're in the noise generation system. And like, I was just booking an appointment, standard dermatology appointment. I got 15 different things.

I gotta confirm on text, I gotta confirm on email, I gotta go into the portal, I gotta go into the payment portal, I gotta... It's like, forget it. Forget about it. I'm changing facilities.

You're making me insane, and I Warren Zenna: They overcomplicate this stuff. Yeah. I think there's probably gonna end up being like a bot that you can just send out and say, "Make this appointment for me and fill out all the information for me. I don't wanna deal with this crap."

I do think that's coming. MK Marsden: I do too. Warren Zenna: I do. I think it has to happen.

Either people have to lower the barrier to get into it, like these things are just too complicated. But if it is complicated, if I can deploy an agent to just make these appointments for me, I would just rather do that. And I think that sounds like it's probably more likely gonna be the case that things are not gonna be bureaucratic. I think it's more likely that we'll figure out ways to solve bureaucracy because bureaucracy is, I think it's gonna get worse.

But I do agree. I think it's crazy, the amount of, you know, do you want it sent by text? Do you want an email confirmation? You know, oh, we have to do your OAuth, and your two-factor authorization and, oops, your password's wrong.

And it's like, Jesus Christ, man, I just wanted to get a bagel, you know? Like, please, leave me alone here, you know? MK Marsden: I just want a bagel. One of the things I say, you know, 'cause I invented transactional email, so you can blame me now when you go buy a Warren Zenna: explain what that is, if you don't mind.

I'd just be curious to know if people might understand what transactional email, what you mean by that. I think people might think that all email is transactional, so explain what you mean by that. MK Marsden: Yeah, that's cool. Thank you.

So transactional email was when the relationship already exists between you and the vendor. So it was your order confirm, your shipping confirm, your password reset. It was that category of email. And back when we invented it, those were just plain courier text pieces of paper, or you got a physical piece of paper if you went to the pharmacy or the coffee shop, right?

So we digitized all that and branded it. So Sephora was a big customer. Walmart was a big customer. So when you got the "Here's your order," it was suddenly branded and there were cross-sells and up-sells in it.

And when you had to reset your password, it had nice messaging and it was like, "If we can help you with anything," and there was a link to the Contact Warren Zenna: I see. So it was like almost like using these transactions as another way to engage the customer, keep the dialogue and... I see. I follow you.

Yep. Makes sense. MK Marsden: So now when you go to Starbucks and you get three emails for one cup of coffee, it's because I didn't think to put an off switch to limit it to one per recipient, right? Like if I had thought about that 20 years ago, you'd only get one, but now you get one from your credit card, you get one from the loyalty program, you get one from the vendor, you get one from, you know.

And it's because when you're inventing these things, you don't think about full on use case, right? What's it gonna look like 10 years from now when this works, 20 years from now when it works? So when we're looking at how do we help salespeople and buyers connect, we're trying to look at the crisis we're in right now with the complexity, the noise, the 20 hours of research, missing quota, CRO doesn't know how to do his job, company doesn't support me properly, all this chaos.

We're trying to look at that. We're trying to say, "Okay, we have to solve for the immediate," and how do we create an environment that is successful for both parties going forward, right? And so, just because things are cheap and easy doesn't mean we should be doing cheap single function apps. Like, I think we should go back to designing solutions, stuff that matters that lives through the life cycle, right?

Like you made a great comment. I am not a piece of funnel. When I am a buyer, I am not a piece of funnel. Don't treat me like something that's floating in a funnel.

I am a human being with a job and a function to perform, and I am considering working with you as a partner in solving my business problem. We've lost all that. Warren Zenna: I believe we lost it mainly because the way in which business organizations are operating today to grow their businesses, it all has to come down to the way people are incentivized and managed. So if I'm a salesperson and my job is to get the number of deals per day or number of calls per day or get a certain pipeline health count score per day, then naturally if I know that I'm gonna be measured against those metrics, then every time I talk to somebody, I'm actually gonna treat them like one of those things because I'm gonna want to create that outcome to build on my incentivized managed goals, right?

So if, and we've tried this, right? I've ran teams where we realized, okay, what we're doing is makes sense. I mean, I certainly want at the end of the day to be able to look at people's activity and look at their calendars and see what they're doing and measure the way they're operating so we can determine if they're successful. But we over-engineered it.

We found that people were doing things just to feed the system and get a good signal back from their manager or avoid being admonished for not doing so. And so we changed it. We were like, "Look, how about this? How about maybe think about it more whether or not you're being in service of the person you're talking to or not."

Like, that's it. Like, just think about whether or not this person really needs this or not and what it can do with them. Think about more the measurable outcomes that you as a sales engineer could bring to this person and make that thing. And we found that what happened was even though people felt a little bit more inspired about the conversations they were having, they were having a lot less.

And so it was sort of like, it's a weird trade-off. It's on one hand they're doing the right thing, but it doesn't generate as much volume. And so there is a real problem with the way in which we try to grow a business, which is we sort of in a way have to cajole people to have certain conversations that may not seem natural in order to drive the outcomes we want. And I don't know the balance of this.

I don't. I think the problem mainly, frankly, depends on what you're selling. I mean, if you're selling something that just has really high value potential, like it's the kind of thing that if someone got it that you could really very easily determine what the value is, like it's life-saving or something like that. But most things are sort of middling, you know?

They're like, "Okay. Yeah, I guess this will do this much for you," and, "I have this job and I'm selling this thing that's mildly interesting. But at the same time too, I wanna keep my job and I have to fill my pipeline, so I'm gonna talk to these people a certain way." And it leads me to believe that as the organizations, like you said it before, it's so easy now to do all these communications that it's made the threshold of importance on businesses really difficult because now it's too easy to send out emails.

It's too easy to do outbound. It's too easy to buy ads. It's too easy to do it, and if everyone can do it, then it's hard to determine the customers, like what's really, what really matters. So it has to be more customer centric.

It's like, well, what does really matter, right? I mean, so I think people are gonna be gravitating more towards jobs where the value is really apparent and there's fewer of those, you know? And I think it's gonna make it difficult for businesses to thrive when they just don't have as a compelling offer. It's like, hmm.

So I don't know. I really think we're in the middle of an incredible shift in the way we're going to business, the way we're going to market right now, and I don't think anybody really fully understands what it's gonna look like five years from now. But everyone's throwing a lot of shit against the wall. I can see that.

It's incredible what I'm seeing right now. I'm curious to know what you're talking about when you talk to your customers about stuff like this. Warren Zenna: Thanks again for listening to the CRO Spotlight podcast. We're excited about all the great guests we have, and more importantly, we're excited mostly about you for being avid listeners and supporting the work that we do here.

Feel free, please, to share the CRO Spotlight podcast with any of your colleagues. We just think there's a great wealth of information here, and wanna get the word out to as many people as possible, and your support of the show is really appreciated. I wanted to share information about a program that we offer called the CRO Masters Council. The CRO Masters Council is a bimonthly group of six seasoned chief revenue officers who are looking for a chief revenue officer board of directors, so to speak, that they could share what's going on with them, collaborate with ideas, get some feedback on what's going on in their current role.

And these are great conversations. I facilitate them. The CRO Masters Councils, again, they're twice a month, and they last for at least six months to a year. So if you're interested in having your own CRO suite, your own board of directors of chief revenue officers, it's a private, confidential conversation that we have.

It's infinitely useful. Imagine having a room full of other chief revenue officers you can talk to and say, "Hey, I'm working on this," or, "Have you guys figured that out?" Or, "I'm having this issue right now with my business or my results." These are just invaluable conversations with chief revenue officers.

Chief revenue officers have a very, very unique role. It's a very lonely job, and only other CROs understand what you're going through. So that's why we created this program. So if you're interested in being a member of the next CRO Masters Council, which we have a number of them being put together right now, just go to my LinkedIn and DM me Masters or Masters Council, and I'll follow up with you and set up a call or send you some more information about it.

Looking forward to seeing you there, and thank you. MK Marsden: Yeah. So I wanna go back to the beginning with you. What we measure matters.

Warren Zenna: Of course. MK Marsden: And what ruined B2B sales was the software system and like Salesforce. Salesforce. When you suddenly take a relationship and you break it into a series of events written by software people who have never sold anything to anybody, who don't understand sales, and then you put finance in charge.

Okay, like, now we're in the shit show. Like, now we're in the shit show. We're measuring like phone calls and things like that. It doesn't matter if I make 1,000 phone calls to the wrong person who doesn't wanna buy my stuff, or if I make one phone call to the right person and have the right conversation, and they need my stuff.

So we got people wasting their time doing these ridiculous measurements that have nothing to do with the relationship they're trying to establish, right? And so, let's get back and understand, and the buyer will tell you all day long what the measurement of success is. It's the impact you have on their business, over what period of time, and how easy you make it for them to absorb that product or service or whatever into their environment, and how quickly people improve their productivity or feel better or whatever.

The buyer will tell you all day long what the measurement of success is. You just gotta start listening. And just because we can measure clicks and phases of the moon and other things doesn't mean we should be holding people accountable to that, right? Like, I get really, I get really twisted because, one, I was a contributor to this crap that people are using.

So I'm mad about that. So I have to go back and fix it, is a little bit of how I'm feeling. Warren Zenna: So you're on like a redemption, a redemption tour of sorts right now. MK Marsden: Yeah.

Because if not, I'm going in the wrong direction. Warren Zenna: Look, we all were, you know, we're all part of it. I mean, we all sold stuff. We were like, "What am I doing?"

But at some point too, I do see your point, and I obviously agree. I just also see it having now run a lot of businesses and running teams, I also recognize too that I need data. You know, I need to know what's going on, right? I need to be able to have...

I got fired over this. I was a CRO at a company eons ago. It was like right before I started this company, actually. I got this job running a...

It was a lot of mistakes. Doesn't matter. The point is, it was an early stage company that had actually a really unique, novel solution. It also happened to be a solution that I knew most - I knew a lot about.

I had a sort of very unique understanding of this particular market, so I was a very good hire for these people because I knew this market, and I had just a broad depth of understanding of what we were selling. And I knew the audience, I knew the problems, and so I didn't require any training. Like, I was just out of the box, probably one of the smarter people to talk about this particular thing. It was a good fit for my background.

So I took this job, and I was running this whole thing, and what happened was I'm out there having these conversations, and I was being managed in a way that was very like you're saying, very metrics driven. Like, "How many people did you speak to?" And put the, put it in, put it in the Salesforce so we can measure things. And I'm not saying I'm right, but my attitude at the time was like, "No, like, that's stupid.

Like, you're making me, taking me 40% of my time giving you data, and I'd rather be talking to people. Like, just have someone follow me around with a notebook. I mean, this is dumb." And they were like: Look, no, we need metrics.

Like, this team needs to know what's going on, who you're talking to, and what the opportunities are, 'cause we can learn from it. I actually agree with them, like, they're not wrong. So I see both sides of it. I just didn't wanna do it because it was taking me away from the thing that I, in my opinion, I should be doing, which is just talking to people and getting more engagements.

And I'm also, and I think a lot of salespeople are like this, MK Marsden: Oh yeah, totally. Warren Zenna: They don't wanna do this stuff. Like, they don't wanna sit around all day entering data into a system, and they're being asked to. And what's happening is they're trying to identify a different type of profile of person that they're trying to hire.

Now they want someone who's more of a, almost like a systems operator that interacts well with software as opposed to somebody that goes out there and interacts with people. So I just don't know if we've sort of figured that out. I do, having now run enough of these things, understand there is a need to collect enough data to know what people are doing, the kind of conversations they're having. However, I also recognize, too, some of these platforms we've created in the last five years solve it to a large degree.

Like, you look at like right now, okay, this show is being recorded. And at the same time too, if I wanted, I could have my other listening tool recording this that's taking notes and giving me all sorts of insights and backing up those insights against all the data knowledge that I have inside of my IP library to kind of help extrapolate some very specific knowledge from it because it has contextual understanding of my business, and it can give me insights about this discussion, and it can help me do other things with it.

We didn't have that when I was selling even five years ago. So there is a lot of ways that we're able to now compound data that we don't need to use these software systems anymore. In fact, another thing, sorry I'm going on so long, but it's interesting. I have Salesforce, right?

I have it, an instance of it set up for my business, and the way I worked it out is I don't do anything with it. It's plugged into my AI, and all I do is I open up a Salesforce skill in my AI platform and I say, "Look at all the conversations I had this week, every conversation I had, every phone call, every email I got, look at my calendar, look at all these things." And it does it automatically. I don't have to tell it to anymore.

It just runs a cycle, and it gives me a list of every single conversation that I've had and all the background and everything, and I'm like, "Okay, great. Put it in my Salesforce for me." And it does it. So what I mean is I think we're getting to a point where I don't need to look at these interfaces that much anymore.

I can just query my platform verbally, and it'll just give me the data that I'm looking for. And we're going to rapidly get there, and I think that that honestly can create the opportunity for salespeople to start doing the things again that they should be doing. And I think it's good. So I think it's both good and bad in a weird way.

Like, I see both. MK Marsden: I'm gonna jump in here because the scenario you just gave, first of all, the people that you're talking to, you've already qualified or are on some level like qualified. You're not out SDR-ing and spamming and Warren Zenna: no, that's for sure. I, MK Marsden: So you're using the tool, you're using the tool in the relationship.

The other thing is, you're looking at it from a holistic sales standpoint. So you're not the finance guy saying, "Hey, Warren, like you spent seven and a half seconds too long on the intro with MK and you should have spent three more minutes on the this and that," right? Like this is Warren Zenna: Yeah, I do. MK Marsden: is where we got out of control, was when people who don't understand sales are now managing Warren Zenna: one more sentence than it should have according to our metrics.

Yeah. MK Marsden: Yeah. According to her metrics, she should have spoken two more seconds longer and you like… Warren Zenna: cut down the beginning another minute, you know, like, okay. Thank, thank you.

MK Marsden: so what tool you use and what you measure matters when, right? And like where we went wrong, I think, was when we stopped trusting the human-to-human relationship between the buyer and the seller, and we thought that that was just a series of events, right? No. Trust in the brand, your longevity, the fact that you show up on time for your meeting, like these other ingredients are critical to being able to create the relationship and a multi-year transaction with your customer.

We're not measuring that. We're measuring clicks, sends, opens, ads, and it's all because that's what software engineers understand, Warren Zenna: Mm-hmm. MK Marsden: right? That's what we understand, Warren Zenna: Yeah, they were instructed to build it that way.

They were saying, "What are the key things that we need to measure so that we have the data we need to conduct a, let's say, analysis of activity?" And all these things were created. And I understand it's like weird. You know, you give engineers a problem like this, and they're gonna solve it in that way, and it does make logical sense.

I'm just saying the sort of corollary outcome is it creates behaviors and also inefficiencies that I think people probably didn't necessarily think about. And now, as a result, we're slaves to technology as opposed to just talking to people. It's - I don't really understand how to solve it. I think that I could see both sides of it, but I do think it's out of control.

There's no question about that. I don't think anyone would argue that point. MK Marsden: I think he can read - I think we'll get to the place, just like right now we can read the whole internet worth of information and come up with a thesis. I think we'll be able to read trust.

I think we'll be able to... You know, we've got some colleagues that we know in common that are starting to measure the quality of interaction between people. If somebody tells you they're gonna deliver you something on Friday and they don't deliver it to you on Friday and they don't have it by Tuesday, then, you know, what do you do next? So I think quality of interaction, the reliability, the transparency of interaction, it is not measuring bit functions.

It's about a higher level form of measurement to get back to, you know, what are we solving for? They're solving for business problems. We wanna be their partner in solving the business problem. The person wants to get their commission and get paid.

Let's start measuring those things. They are measurable. Warren Zenna: Thank you so much again for listening to the CRO Spotlight podcast. This podcast is an important plank in the CRO Collective communication strategy, and we're really thrilled to have such great guests on here.

So listening and sharing the podcast with other people is really vital because we wanna get as many people listening to this great stuff as possible. Couple things to note, if you're a aspiring CRO or a recently hired CRO or even a old, salty CRO, and you're looking to either become a chief revenue officer or improve your chops and gain some more insights and improve your competencies as a chief revenue officer, we offer the CRO Accelerator course. It's five years now. It's the first CRO-focused course that was out there.

It's a 15-week course that is populated by aspiring chief revenue officers and CROs. We're pretty selective in terms of who can be a member of the CRO Accelerator course. It's people whom are probably more ready to be a CRO right now. They have number of years under their belt as a revenue leader, whether it be a sales leader or a marketing leader or even rev ops leader, and they either wanna move into the C-suite or they're CROs that wanna just make sure that they win in the role.

So if you are interested in being a member of the next cohort, please just write me a note on LinkedIn. Just DM me, CRO Accelerator, and we'll set up a time to talk. And then I can send you more information to give you a brochure of the course. So again, CRO Accelerator course, 15-week program for aspiring and newly hired CROs.

Take advantage of it. It's been great, and you'll see some more information about it on the website. Thanks. Warren Zenna: I worked with this company eons before the AI came about, and they were trying to do this exact thing, was to measure...

It's kind of, I don't know if it's possible, maybe it is now. Measure how people feel, MK Marsden: Yeah. Warren Zenna: right? So like when you're having calls, what signals indicate someone feeling like manipulated or feeling gratified or, you know, grateful or helped, you know, or satisfied or annoyed, you know?

And it's more subtle than just someone saying, you know, "You're annoying me," or, "I'm really happy right now." You know? It's more like tonality and pausing, like really interesting ways that they're able to do it using language recognition. And the idea would be that they would...

I think this is being done now. You basically look at a dashboard and you can tell over the course of all these conversations across the entire organization, like what type of things are we saying that tend to drive people feeling distrusted or feeling annoyed or feeling alienated or feeling not listened to, or vice versa, that they feel really excited or they feel like relieved or something. And if we can identify those things, then maybe we can engineer the way we can talk to people in ways that will make those things more outcome.

And I don't know if you can manufacture that stuff. I think it's interesting to know it. I'm not sure that I could say, "Well, you know, do it this way." I think it's just, well, how about just don't be annoying?

It's probably a better piece of coaching, I think, you know. Just don't be an MK Marsden: agree with you. I think we can measure it, and then I think it is about coaching and helping each other. And I think it does start with the question.

Warren Zenna: Yeah, sure. MK Marsden: as a human, you can tell when you're annoying somebody. Warren Zenna: know. I don't know.

I think a lot of times I think I'm really smart and really engaging, and I think people are like, well, they probably shoot themselves or slicing their wrists while they're talking to me, and I don't even know about it, you know? So I don't know about that. I think I'm probably the worst person to ask because either, A, I think everyone thinks I'm annoying or no one thinks I'm annoying. You know, it's never that subtle with me, you know?

So I don't really know if I'm a good person to ask about that. MK Marsden: you're funny. You're funny. But no, I think the signals are there.

I think we need to start measuring what matters. I think we need to help each other know about what's going on in each other's worlds so the conversations are valuable because everybody is lacking time and overstressed and under pressure. And so, you know, when you get the opportunity to have a conversation, like, you know, come ready, come interested, come- Warren Zenna: come to serve and solve a problem, I think is another one. But I think there's probably two layers to this.

This is interesting. I give a lot of thought to this. So there's a couple things. So one is there's the obvious thing, which is I'm making a purchase for some reason.

I have some business problem, and usually it's I wanna make more money or I wanna save time, right? Like, it's not a difficult thing to think about what most transactions are gonna... I'm investing in either I want my money to increase, or I wanna save money, or I wanna save time, right? Those are pretty much three things.

So if I'm selling something, I certainly need to know first which one of those is it that we do, right? So are we someone that we a product that makes people more money, we make people that saves money, or we save them time? You have to know that. And then how much money or how less money or how much time?

And if you can be there, right? So then I can then have a transactional discussion with the person around, "All right, so let's just say it's time saving. How much time?" Right?

"Okay, fine. So we think that we've seen customers X number of hours." Fine. And all that.

And I think that needs to happen, and I don't think that's being done. Even that minor thing we just discussed is not being done with the level of precision it should be, and it's not engineered properly. I don't think there's a point in... I don't see too often where someone in the sales process says something like, "Here's your business, your particular situation for our product, and here's the impact we believe that the product will have on your business from, let's say, in this case, a time savings perspective.

And this is how long it'll take, and this is how much it'll save you. MK Marsden: Yep. Warren Zenna: we're gonna agree to this. And that means that you now know what the cost is gonna be to you, what the time it's gonna take for you to get the value, and then we can measure that.

And if it happens, then satisfaction was realized," right? Person's like, "Okay, good. You made a promise to me for this, and then now, now that satisfaction results in what else can you do for me?" But you don't see this happen, right?

That prism. But then there's the other piece which people don't talk about, 'cause let's say you do that. I think it's a good thing. You MK Marsden: Okay, so our reports do that.

I have to tell you, my Warren Zenna: Okay, good. I'm just saying I don't see it happening a lot. I talk to a lot of people, they don't do that with me. They don't engineer a value exchange.

But the second part though is things like chemistry MK Marsden: Mm-hmm. Warren Zenna: frequency MK Marsden: Yep. Warren Zenna: and energy. MK Marsden: Yep.

Warren Zenna: know, you know, it plays such a big role in this stuff. And if you don't think about that sort of thing, a lot of it's not in your control. I mean, why is it that you cer- like you and I, we had dinner and we talked for like five hours, right? Why is that?

I don't know. I'm not God. I don't know the reason why you and I may... I don't know.

And why is it there's someone I talk to and in two seconds I'm like, "Get me away from this person." Like, I don't know the answer to that question. And so I think a lot of it is sort of very, we don't know. And I think if you're, you have to be kind of self-conscious of that stuff.

Yes, you can do the things you can control, which is what we just discussed, like engineer the conversation properly and keep your promises and do what you said you'd do, no question, right? But whether or not you kind of have that other stuff, I don't know. It may not happen. MK Marsden: So I'll tell you why I like being with you.

Okay? That'll take - I'll give you some indicator. So one, I really appreciate your curiosity. You're incredibly curious, and you ask really good questions.

So it's not like the, "Oh, hi, how was your day?" You know, that's the 30-minute dinner conversation. Like, Warren Zenna: Yeah. MK Marsden: out in my head, I gotta get out of here," right?

You dig in and you dig in. So that's number one. Your curiosity is number one. Warren Zenna: Okay.

MK Marsden: Number two, you listen. Okay. You actually have to listen. If you're gonna ask somebody a question, then actually listen to their answer fully, Warren Zenna: guess you're right.

Mm-hmm. MK Marsden: So get curious, ask good questions, listen to the questions, build the conversation Warren Zenna: Mm-hmm. MK Marsden: from that. Respect each other.

You and I come from completely different universes. Warren Zenna: Yep. MK Marsden: Completely different universes. We meet in a center of absolute respect and regard for each other's history and what we're committed to doing.

Okay, so get curious, listen like hell, respect the person that you're with, then five hours feels like five minutes. Warren Zenna: Yeah, I agree. I do appreciate, thank you for that. And I do the best I can here, you know.

But I would say those are probably trainable skills. I think that someone probably might more naturally inclined to have those, but you could train people to do those things. I would agree with that. I think you could do that.

MK Marsden: I really do. I really do. And - But we've had everybody down worried about like clicks and calls and subject line using AI and Apollo and ZoomInfo. No, no, let's get - We can handle all that with AI.

I got it on my Signal side. You've got it with what you do. Now let's get the learn to be curious, understand their business, understand... You made a really great comment, like, "Am I saving you money?

Am I saving you time? Am I saving you resources over time?" You added the Warren Zenna: time. It's not gonna happen immediately, MK Marsden: time.

Warren Zenna: and you have to agree to that. I think that's another thing too, is people want things too quickly today. They do. They want everything to happen right away.

And you know, the best things take time, MK Marsden: They do. Warren Zenna: the things that last anyway, take time. But you know, we're in a fast world. Everybody wants things immediately because you can get everything immediately.

I can make a call right now, and I have pizza at my door in 20 minutes, you know? So, yeah, we really have a weird way of measuring time has become a thing we measure differently, you know? I was just thinking about this. I was watching a movie with my kid.

It was showing New York City in the '90s. I grew up, you know, in New York City in the '90s, and you know, you couldn't call someone right away. You couldn't text somebody right away. You had to wait for them to get back to you.

You might call them and their phone might actually be busy. Like, imagine it was busy a lot, busy signals. I mean, you know what I'm talking about. And I mean, this is something that like, our relationship with time has been completely altered in a way that's not good.

And so the speed with which we want to get things done has created a false expectation about what's possible, and we've created false realities about what success looks like. If it happens really quickly, well, that was more successful than something really good that took a long time. And I think that's we're up against all this, and salespeople are really up against all this. So I, MK Marsden: So I wanna jump on that with you, okay?

Because you talked about defining satisfaction, right? And so when we define satisfaction with our buyer or our colleague or our SME or whoever, when we define it, it's over time, right? Where we got distorted was when we started measuring a click. Okay, a click is a nanosecond.

Warren Zenna: were alike. MK Marsden: Yes. That's where the distortion came, right? Or an open or a cursor over.

This is where we got distorted. Again, I'm going back to we're measuring the wrong thing. So if we're gonna measure satisfaction, satisfaction is built over time. Trust is built over time.

Respect is built over time. Solving complex business problems is built over time. So again, when you measure the wrong thing, then you just don't see, you just don't see the opportunity. Just don't, right?

And I'm working with you and others, and I love what you're doing with your clients, right? On what is it to be CRO ready, okay? What is it to be our CRO ready? You start to measure what really matters to growth.

Warren Zenna: Mm-hmm. MK Marsden: You change the operating environment of your company to a growth operating environment, and that is not nanoseconds, Warren Zenna: No. MK Marsden: right? And so, Warren Zenna: time.

Time is in fact the enemy of everything we do, is what it is that a new CRO needs to do if they want to do it in a way that's gonna really make the impact that they're hired to do, it's gonna take them longer than the company really wants to spend. And so what ends up happening is the CRO is battled between solving really many times important short-term goals, which are much more like there's a lot more dopamine in solving short-term goals than long-term goals, you know? 'Cause there's that sort of like immediacy.

It fills you, you know, with kind of like in charge and stuff, and I can run back and go, "Look what we did today," you know? As opposed to like, "Well, are we still waiting for this? When's it gonna happen?" You know, that's a much less dopamine-driven sort of a context.

But yet those are the things that tend to make the biggest impact, and the CRO is up against this from day one. And so what they do is they get these roles where they're asked to do monumentally important things, which is like the proverbial turning a Titanic around. It's a very difficult thing to do. And it gets halfway turned around, and it's like, "Well, you know, it didn't go all the way around, but we're in a different direction, so this is good."

You know, it's like, yeah, but it's not all the way, so we're sort of like not really there yet. Yeah, but that's fine. Continue. And the CRO knows that that moment is where they're gonna be held accountable for that ship not being turned around, even though they were told not to turn around anymore.

And that is a very difficult place to be in, in this job. There is a way to do it, however, if you don't know how or what, you're in a no-win situation. So I wanted to make sure that we close this in a way that's really compelling and gives you an opportunity to like talk a bit closely more, if you don't mind, just about what specifically are you doing? How can people work with you?

What is it that you're operating right now, and who are you trying to talk to? MK Marsden: Yeah, fantastic. So thank you for that. So I created Sales Sleuth, so salessleuth.

com, is save salespeople time. I want to do all the homework for them all the time so they can create the relationships, so they can focus on the satisfaction measures, so they can invest their time properly. And, you know, we make a difference. We change the value in your pipeline.

We focus on people who are buying. We align your internal team. We show you the tech structure and if you're gonna fit or not fit. We take the guessing out of this, and that's what tech is really good at.

It is good at reading all that data and scoring all that data. And then I want to work with people like you and others to get the measurements back where they need to be. Measurements of satisfaction over time. To your CRO that's, you know, halfway through and then we fire them.

What's the cost of firing multiple CROs over time? Let's start measuring what really matters to the growth of the business. We give CROs like 90 days, 120 days. Okay, you're on your fourth.

You've missed quota nine years in a row. What's the cost of that? So I want to work with you and others. Let's get the right measurement system in place, and let's cause those creations, those connections over time.

Warren Zenna: Well, you know how I feel. I'm with you. MK Marsden: Okay. Warren Zenna: so salessleuth.

com and MK Marsden, as usual, thank you. I love talking with you. We can talk for six hours and I look forward to the next one. MK Marsden: Likewise.

Appreciate you so much, Warren. Thank you. Warren Zenna: You too. MK Marsden: See you soon.