Episode 28, Part 1 - Rory Brown: Forecasting Truth, Not Storytelling, in the Boardroom

Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast. In this podcast, we'll be hearing from other industry leaders to get their thoughts and perspectives on what growth looks like in modern business. We'll cover all aspects of leadership, sales, account development, and customer success alongside other critical elements required to build an effective growth engine for your business. This is part one of our two part series.

Jonny Adams: Fantastic. Welcome to the Growth Workshop podcast. It's lovely to have Rory Brown, the Chief Commercial Officer from Kluster here today. We've got a fantastic episode and we're gonna dig into some of the great insights around Kluster, a little bit of background around Rory and his career to date, and also understand a little bit more about the partnership that Kluster and SBR have together so we can understand how data insights and also how sales enablement works together for our mutual clients, and future clients.

Rory, welcome. Rory Brown: Thank you for having me. Great to be here. A little bit of a wet day out there, but we got there.

Jonny Adams: You've just timestamped where we are. They know it must be winter. Rory Brown: Yes, it is winter. Sorry folks.

Jonny Adams: Fantastic. And and what we do like to start with is just a little bit about you and also about Kluster. Just so the audience and people listening can understand a little bit more about, where you come from, what's your career today and how have you become Chief Commercial officer of Kluster. Rory Brown: Of course.

So Kluster, we build, trusted forecast systems for complex enterprises. We take people on a journey from looking at forecasting as a very simple kind of roll up your pipeline view and mentality to this business wide, let's get real and let's look at every single facet of our business, how it's likely to perform around the corner, and what we can start doing about it to pool levers to perform. Really we see forecasting as a, an executive tool for expectations, for decisions for strategy, but more importantly, or equally as important is looking at it as a performance tool.

The more time people spend in the reality of this is how we're likely to perform, the more time they're in action mode. And that's really what we stand for as a business. How did I get into this world? So left university, I was up in York.

I actually met, my co-founder at Kluster at York. we went off into different careers in London, so I went off to work in sales, recruitment, sales training, sales consultancy. And then eventually I built a sales team in London. So my first, sales team.

My co-founder Dan, went into actuarial science. So he was doing incredible things, funnily enough. He was in the world of forecasting and he did amazing things such as, forecasting the, cost of the BP oil spill for the White House, which was Barrack Obama's government at that time, worked with the Bank of England. He worked with, Goldman Sachs.

So he used to help me in this pursuit of how do I get more data, more clarity into where my sales team is going, where my business is going. I was looking after a profit center at that time, and he used to help me and we just landed on, hang on, this has gotta be something that people should be better at. And of course I was serving lots of technology companies in London at that time. So I was asking the, sales leaders and the executive leaders in those companies, is this a thing for you?

Are you, confident all the time and where you're headed and what you need to do? Absolutely not. So that's where the business was born. Jonny Adams: Wow.

That's a great background and there's a little bit of insight there that I didn't know about. So I have to say your co-founder probably, that's a vastly interesting background. But just out of curiosity, so there's a couple of things that you said there, you said about how Kluster and, your sort of career has panned out. If we get straight into it because people listening will wanna understand some of the use cases and some of the challenges that you solve for.

If you had to summarize the major use case that you see and Kluster are solving for, how would you describe that and summarize that? Rory Brown: Clarity of the reality that we're in and the depth of that clarity. I'll explain what that means. It's very good if an executive team can say six months out, there's a performance delta.

If you are, Private Equity backed, that's board expectations. It's costs, it's decisions, it's strategy, it's managing your stakeholders. It's gaining credibility that that situation is coming and you have it under control. If you're public, it's markets, it's forecast calls, it's earning.

That's great. That's level one. Level two is when you start to bring that clarity of reality deep into the organization. And by what I mean by that is, okay, your demand team, the demand and the campaigns that are running today, we're going to have a revenue shortfall in six to nine months.

What are we doing? I'm a sales rep. It's the beginning of the quarter. I'm feeling really good about this quarter as sales reps tend to do 'cause that's why we hire them.

They're positive. but ultimately, okay. Statistics say reality says there's a shortfall, there's a shortfall on these areas, and these are the profiles of opportunities, activities that you need to do to catch up. That the more we bake that into an organizational way of working.

And it takes the right leadership and it takes the right culture and all the things I'm sure we're gonna discuss that SBR do absolutely brilliantly. The sooner we get to a place where everyone is anticipating and everyone is in course correction, we do not want people who are sitting there and somewhere beneath them there's data and information telling them you will not perform. They can't see it, and they're off to the pub at five o'clock every night. Jonny Adams: But you're really bringing to the surface the solution and what's going through my thoughts with some of our mutual clients, some of the businesses that we will be working together with when we can mix data and enablement together.

Why is this still a problem? Because what you are sharing there is about clarity and clearly Kluster is around to provide the clarity at not just level one down further, but why do businesses have that issue? What's the makeup of their organization where they're not able to see the clarity? Because just to give the audience a bit of background that the C-suite that we speak to, whether it's the chief revenue officer or even the CEO of organizations.

Has to typically go to a board. And they have to present figures. And I always see the balance between data and storytelling as one of the most crucial two skills that you can take there. And there's a lot of BS that goes on with the storytelling piece because they don't really know the data.

So surface the pain and, I think that will help the audience really understand what are we solving for in the organization. Rory Brown: Yeah, of course. The first part of this is intelligence. The intelligence that you can produce as an organization.

There's the efficiency of producing that intelligence, which immediately turns into how much of it can you produce, and at what quality. If you have typically this falls with a finance team or revenue operations team. They're the people producing information if they spend too much time building. If they spend too much time stitching together, they're immediately building a latency into how that intelligence and that information travels up and out and into the hands of the people that we need to action it.

More importantly, their time is then being taken out and away from using that intelligence of becoming experts themselves, of how to turn that intelligence into things that we need to do, things that we need to change, levers that we need to pull. The importance is the window that we give them. For example, we work with lots of companies from private equity backed mid-market businesses to listed companies. And the other week, I was speaking to a CEO, over in the States, and the question that they had was, I need to know what levers I need to.

I'm sitting here, I'm getting the news of how my business is performing 'cause it's coming through all these different places. Slowly, Spreadsheet system, through someone's hands, logic, manipulate, blah, blah, blah, blah. And eventually it ends up at his level and then he's thinking, I now got the news of where we're headed of the performance, but what do I do? There's no depth to this.

Like what? Where are the gaps? What are the teams who needs to action what? Where do I build a memo of an action plan to who and hold them to account on it, and how do I do that in time?

Otherwise, I'm literally sitting here and I'm going to my board and saying, here's the news. Full stop. Not, here's the news in six months, here's what we've identified as the gaps. Here's the people responsible.

Here's the programs we're running, here's what we're expecting in terms of a delta close on those programs. I'll come back next time that we meet and I'll tell you how well we're closing that gap. That is someone who has their business on a shoestring, and that's the ultimate challenge. So many executives, so many, leadership people will be quietly in their mind thinking.

And like that. I need more visibility. I need to demonstrate more control. I need to run my business on the shoestring.

And it's, too slow to get the information to me. Jonny Adams: I think whenever I've spoken to you before today, I've always gathered insight from you. You've always been someone that's shared a couple of golden nuggets. I'm like, oh, that's a really great thinking point.

How, how could we describe what a boardroom is like? And then if we think about that environment, because fundamentally what Kluster is able to do is really, be able to give that data driven insight for those individuals in that boardroom to have really compelling conversations, not just to look at as is state or past state, we're actually able to look to the future and think about the obstacles. And so what de describe what that boardroom might look like from your experience.

And then how does Kluster solve for that? Create that orchestration for us. Rory Brown: What's the forecast... what's the empirical evidence that we can trust it?

That's the fundamental underlying top level conversation. Everything below that is. Actions, strategies, plans. Jonny Adams: And why forecasting?

I know it sounds really basic question because if you think about the litmus test of what a great business is about, also what sales leaders should be, CROs should be, salespeople, should be, it's all about forecasting. But what is forecasting? Rory Brown: Forecasting is actually, an interesting word. I think it's misunderstood.

I think it's, it's slim lined into something less than it. That it is in many organizations, forecasting is in any important part of the business that we're monitoring, will it hit or beat plan in the future? And the second part of forecasting is the empirical evidence that sits underneath that's baked into that. So as an example, it's very possible to choose data and choose trends and be someone who's in a room under pressure and create a narrative based on those selected trends that tell everyone we're going where we think we want to go.

Jonny Adams: Sounds like politics. Rory Brown: Sounds like politics. It is. I'm sure there's loads and loads of politics going on in every boardroom.

How many are earnest and honest with each other all the time? I don't know. I don't have those stats. Jonny Adams: And let's not get into that.

Rory Brown: No, let's not get into that or politics for that matter. But the skill is being able to showcase empirical evidence that cannot have a narrative next to it, which can be tweaked and changed and moved. It is a fact. It is cold hard.

This is what's happening. This is where we're going. This is where the delta is. So forecasting is about how far in advance can we confidently understand where important parts of our business are going to perform?

Is that on plan? Then what's the empirical evidence that sits underneath that we can trust that hasn't been manipulated, that we all trust, that we all believe? When you've done that, you're in this incredible space where you can make some really big, bold decisions. And it could be positive decisions for the business or negative, like the, it goes both ways.

Let's launch in Germany and beat our competitor to the market because we're gonna beat plan and we're so confident in that empirical evidence, or we need to dial back here and just back out that market and let them take it and focus on what we're good at because we're not gonna make it. And so many times those plays don't turn out right. or more importantly, the decisions just don't get made. We're at an impact.

We're just like sitting there thinking. We could have made a call there. We didn't, take advantage, or we didn't take advantage of the uphold downside. Jonny Adams: This is so compelling.

I absolutely love it. We've got business level forecasting. Sales leadership. You own the forecast.

Describe what does that feel like for the sales leader and what do they need to do from a forecaster perspective? Rory Brown: I feel for sales teams, I really do, for lots of reasons. I have a sales background, so probably empathetic for that reason. Empathetic.

Yeah. They have the world's worst anchor when it comes to forecasting, they have a quota, but that quota may be well designed and maybe ill designed. I'm sure many people think I'm in one of those, one of those camps, but every sales rep thinks their quotas unfair. But they've got quota in their head.

So let's say I'm an enterprise rep and my quota is a million. That's my anchor. So immediately the first time I'm on a, I'm on a forecast call and I'm under pressure from my VP and saying, whatcha gonna do what gonna do. You've gotta create a narrative.

You've gotta create a story. You've gotta bend everything in front of you to a million. And if you don't, they'll probably say, how could you get to a million? But what's the scenario?

Okay, should we submit that scenario, scenario. I've seen this so commonly that, and it all comes from the top, if forecasting is not a true serum culturally, and it's okay to be open and it's, celebrated that someone can forecast. Half their quota. unless that's the case, everyone's gonna be coming up with a story to make quota until it's not.

I've got a really interesting story. I've got a good friend of mine, who works at a huge data company, my IPO, since you might guess who they are. and famously he joined the organization from, from Amazon and, in his early days his VP who was of that way, okay, tell me the story. Tell me the story that gets you there.

What's your story? Zero. You say, no, it can't be zero. It's zero.

My forecast is zero. Just stop talking and this, VP like, couldn't take it. Couldn't understand it. No.

No. There has to be a way. Nope. There's no way.

It's a zero. Now, fast forward a few years and he is brought in some huge banks and some multimillion dollar contracts, and he's now in with the executives of that business and he's doing incredibly well. But yet the conference in that moment as an individual contributor. To see a zero.

And so many sales reps will not have that because the culture coming down is like that VP and they'll just, pander to the wishes. Jonny Adams: Wow. That is so helpful. We haven't had a guest on this podcast that's really perfectly, and so well put how forecasting is not just for the board, but for the sales reps and also for the sales leaders.

And I guess in a moment we're gonna talk. More about Kluster. How Kluster supports that. Because ultimately if we've got a fantastic piece of technology that can surface those insights, then we've got an ability to actually, make this a little bit more industrialized, scalable, and actually start to think about what the future could look like for us.

Let's think about Kluster. Now we know that the challenge that organizations have and maybe forecasting is one of those, levers, and you did mention earlier, there's a number of other levers, which I'm so curious about. You can't, just tease me with, there are loads of levers and not tell us what those are. So you have to do that later.

But how does Kluster help and support businesses achieve their outcomes? Could you give a little bit more insight around that? Rory Brown: Sure. I think this is where our partnership with SBR really comes in as well, because, there's the platform, there's the data that feeds the platforms, there's the workflows, there's the processes, there's how we inspire our people to use those and be honest, intellectually honest.

And there, there's how we train people and enable people to do that. And SBR runs some brilliant programs in this area. So forecasting is part art. Scenarios deals, influencing people, navigating politics, building champions, navigating risk, pulling favors, social capital, like all these important things to, to, win deals.

And in the science. 'Cause at some point there's a volume of these scenarios that roll up. And we've got to quantify where most people go wrong is one person builds art. Roll up forecast.

Another person builds science, Finance, or Rev Ops, and then they come together and they clash and they disagree. And one, these people say, no, the science is wrong. And then the science says, no, you are wrong. And then it's, a butting of the heads.

But what if we blend art and science into one workflow? And this is where Kluster brings something incredibly unique to market, where we see a lot of success and eureka moments. And I cannot believe I didn't forecast this way before because when you have a VP, let's say, and they build a scenario of the deals that are coming in, and some are in commit, some in best case, some are outside shots, there's maybe some couple from next quarter that I could pull in, a bit of rob Peter to pay Paul.

But when I look at that. And I also look at, okay, what's the pace we're creating demand? We're like, will I create some more pipeline in quarter? Will we close it?

What does that typically look like? How we, how are we trending there and how much of next quarters do I tend to pull in? And, I know I've got these deals in Commit. There's 40 there and there's 60 in Best Case.

And there's 106 in Pipeline. But from today until the end of the quarter, I know we push. What does that look like? What is that data point?

As soon as you start bringing this jigsaw together, you allow the scenario, the art, the skill of the deal, and you quantify how well that skill and that art turns into results, and you bring it into one workflow. You're bringing the two roles together, and you more importantly, you're bringing the two worlds together in a way where people can say, here's my forecast, here's my empirical evidence. Tell me why I'm wrong. Jonny Adams: Oh, this is like a Shakespearean play.

It's, I've got an image in my head of the artist and, the scientists coming together and, clashing with their swords and dueling. I guess when we think about, that aspect, then Kluster, I would imagine opens up some uncomfortable truths about a business, and as humans, we particularly like to protect ourselves away from the uncomfortable situation. So what are some of maybe name two things that Kluster can really shine a light on that could be slightly uncomfortable, for sales teams or even businesses alike.

Are there any that come to mind? Rory Brown: Oh, there's a lot. Jonny Adams: And this is a positive aspect of uncovering these. Rory Brown: We live in the game of un uncomfortable truths and that's where, that's where the culture of how you deal with that and how openly you can discuss that is incredibly important with programs running, working with someone like SBR about how you build this into cadence and the things that should be discussed in meetings and how openly and getting executives to sponsor that openness.

This is super important stuff. But to give you examples, it could be as simple as, you are a region and a VP and there's a 20, there's a, 20 million hole and you created a story that you get there, but all the data says it's not possible and you're coining that, but you're building exactly the wrong type of pipeline to close the gap. It's never gonna close in time, and the whole story is just completely shot in an instant. There, there's something as, as obvious as that.

It could well be, and we have this a lot, bear in mind, we come into a business and they're having quarterly or, sometimes if it's a new PE firm, I've just bought them over. It's, monthly, it's, bimonthly board calls, they've come out of a board meeting and they've said this confidently and we meet the CEO for the first time and the this is now no longer confident and it's incredibly shaky and there's an uncomfortable scenario here and that I thought the APAC journey was further along.

You just showed me in the data, there's so many holes, like this demand channel isn't even working we'll just put loads of money into it or we really can't replicate our top performers. And another thing that SBR come in and do beautifully, but I've just told the board that APAC's gonna head at calls. So what do we do now? Jonny Adams: I think, this is so interesting because I'm sure people are thinking, I've led the witness with that question about what are the, what's the uncomfortable situation?

But I guess it comes back to this sort of science and art piece, is that if the organization has the right culture, the right mindset, actually you can look at those challenges as a positive. You could see that as the information that's being provided gives us the truth serum, that we can make great decisions moving forward, draw a line in the sand and go, we are in a 20 million pound hole, but actually, how do we solve for that and not make that, worse effectively. Yeah. So if coming from the, probably the, element of seeing what the challenges are, but what are some of the positives, and I guess you could flip those things around its head, right?

Yeah. But what are some of those things that are light bulb moments that I guess your clients have seen from using Kluster? Rory Brown: This is where I'm very excited about Kluster coming in on the consult phase with SBR because you've got the qualitative, let's interview the people. Let's find out where their skillset is, where their biases are, where they're uncomfortable, what they do and don't want to talk about.

And let's show us in the data like exactly where that's hurting us and where that's, that's causing decision lag and where that's causing gaps in our business. Yeah. So the next step, once you've done that is the insight that's directional. So we have a gap.

What we've got to show people is how do you close that gap? What are the channels that are working? Where are you strong? What deal profiles win fast enough that we should be going out and seeking right now with our marketing team, with our SDR team to close a gap in time.

There's a real acuity behind the information that we need to surface for it to be actionable. I think people forget that. And without that, it's very difficult to actually do anything about it. Like exposing a gap is fine, but.

What specifically can be done and can it be done? You could be in a scenario where it's like there's not an awful lot that can be done. It's expectation setting. Now it's management, it's thinking about next quarter.

It's thinking about how we close the collapse for the year and I think something that Kluster does incredibly well is it brings an acuity of insight to people and direction of what needs to be done next that they're just not used to. And especially as we, develop our, AI offering and our AI program like that, that level of actionability is just that the crank is just turning and turning until really it becomes a world of it's so obvious what we need to do now. Do we have the right people to execute?

Are they good executors? And then that's where SBR come in. Let's turn 'em into brilliant executors. Let's replicate our A players.

There's only 10% of those. And how do we get our Bs to there and how do we get 5% more out of A players and all that wonderful stuff that you guys do brilliantly. Jonny Adams: We're gonna get into that in a second. Rory, you're, like, like the best trailer in the world you seem to tease in with, with, a couple of themes before we get onto the, partnership and, we're gonna, we're gonna bring together a bit of a use case together.

So we are gonna hypothesize on a mutual client. We're gonna talk about how Kluster can extract the great insights, and then we're gonna talk about how SBR supports basically dealing with the so what, of that insight in a moment. We'll pick this up in part two. For more insights, make sure you subscribe, and if you enjoy the journey, don't forget to leave us a review.

Your feedback fuels our growth. Until next time, keep up that forward thinking mindset. Goodbye.