Sales-Led, Marketing-Supported: GTM Philosophy That Scales | The GTM Kickback #87 w Trent Waterhouse

Speaker A: Second, I think we're going welcome everyone back. This is another episode of the Go to Market Kickback, the number one Go to Market leadership interview and strategy podcast in the world. Did you know we have that accolade, Trent?

Speaker B: I love that accolade and it's, I'm sure, I'm confident is well deserved.

Speaker A: It's narrow, narrow category, but we're leading it by all accounts. We're joined today by Another wonderful guest, Mr. Trent Waterhouse. Thank you for joining us, Trent.

Speaker B: More than happy to be here. Look forward to sharing some thoughts.

Speaker A: The quick intro on yourself is you're a career private equity operating executive with 25 plus years of scaling both B2B technology and software businesses, but also non software organizations that are backed by PE sponsors. You've been a CEO, a CRO, a CMO and companies backed by Gores, Marlin, Angelus, equity turnarounds, growth mandates, loads of strategic exits to companies like GE and Constellation Software. And you have a really phenomenal philosophy on what it takes to scale these organizations from a go to market revenue generation and growth standpoint that is sales led and marketing supported. And you've built really talented teams that have done phenomenal stuff bringing emerging technologies to markets all across the globe, scaling tremendous numbers from a revenue and quantification standpoint. And you're just an excellent leader that seems like this is very well liked for very good reasons across the industry. So I'm excited to break some of that stuff down with you and appreciate the time that you spend talking about this beforehand and now to sort of give us some of the secrets to your success here.

Speaker B: Absolutely looking forward to the conversation and I've been fortunate in my career to be on great teams with great people.

Speaker A: Well, tell me, does that give us the good perspective we need going into this trend or is there anything else you'd like to color in about your career or sort of path to where you are today?

Speaker B: No, I would say that that kind of sets the landscape. The insights I'm going to share. They've worked across both technology and industrial sectors. It has been across multiple PE sponsors and it's been in everything from software to hardware to services to manufacturing and industrial kind of things. So it's a proven recipe.

Speaker A: Yeah. Well talk to me about that. You've worked across wide range of technology, software industrial organizations, different sizes, different sectors, different PE sponsors that all operate a little bit different, have different expectations. What is about this philosophy sales led, marketing supported, growth oriented sort of model that you've basically applied unilaterally across all those organization that's held up in every

Speaker B: type of environment, it starts going into any new portfolio company and organization with a lot of listening and a lot of diagnostics around. Is everyone aligned towards a common goal and seeking that alignment. It boils down to an idea of what oftentimes looks really complex. If you can, through critical thinking, make it be simple. It allows everybody that's on the team to know every day how what they're doing is helping support the customer. I always use a phrase that I learned way back in 1999 that is there's nothing more important than our customers. If you take care of the customer, everything else, whether that's employee satisfaction or revenue or profits or growth, has a tendency to take care of itself. The best thing that you can do with the customer is enable them through the use of your products and technology to accomplish their business objectives. You do that and you've made a loyal customer for life. And that's what we seek to do. The model, as you mentioned a little bit earlier, it's a field sales marketing model that is built around three simple ideas. How do you be sales led? Selling is always the hardest job in any company. Trust me when I say selling is the hardest job in the world because you're facing objections and you're facing rejection on an hourly basis. And so I view it as being sales driven. Let's let sales set the agenda. Let's be marketing assisted, provide all the sales enablement tools to enable them to be successful. And then if everybody delivers on their promises, you suddenly start driving up that customer satisfaction and the customer is always listening. They're listening for are you making decisions in their best interest or in the company's, the vendor's best interest? It's always better when you make a decision in their best interest because they will pay it back to you orders of magnitude greater over time.

Speaker A: In the context of where did this philosophy come from for you? I look at your career and reflect on the conversations that we've had before. You've held all of these positions as a technologist, as a marketer, as a CEO, as a salesperson, as a field operator. And I'm sure the diversity of perspective that you have in operating in all those different portions of an organization before commanding sort of in these larger leadership functions has helped give you that perspective on why this is a successful, consistent and revenue driving methodology or ideology to apply to any and every kind of business. Is that accurate or can you sort of frame how your progression led you to see that this way will work unilaterally across all sorts of different environments.

Speaker B: I would say that I've been fortunate in that I've got a knack for content. And when you look at content, it's kind of the most important part of any go to market or growth plan. You gotta tell a story and you have to make something complex, seems simple. And you have to very clearly articulate the why you, why now value proposition. Right? And as simple as that sounds, you create that story. You discover the elements of that story by using what God gave us. Two ears, a brain and only one mouth. And what I mean by that is you're listening to customers, you're listening to partners, you're listening to employees. And I've always found over the years the most impactful needle moving ideas come, um, from an employee who's closest to the customer. I always like to say it this way. What happens at headquarters is interesting, but what happens in the field with the customers on a daily basis, that's what's important. And whether the team realizes it or not, every day you're making a promise to a customer. It might be as simple as, hey, we've got an appointment at 10:00'. Clock. Well, that doesn't mean you show up at 10:05, that means you show up at 9:45. Right. Uh, because everyone's time is important, especially these days. And you want to just make sure that you're ready for the engagement by listening and learning before speaking. You start to get that natural buy in. And as much as I can bring steps to a plan or ingredients to a plan, how that cake ultimately comes together is in collaboration with a particular leadership team at the particular portfolio company. And every time it's different and it's always changing. I would love to say that the exact same tactics will work now that worked 25 years ago, but that's just not true. The tactics will always be changing. And whether it's how do you use social media or how are you using video versus white papers, and how do you use something that can be consumed in less than a minute versus the hour long or the 30 minute, or the come to a webinar kind of a thing, people consume differently. People want to watch or people want to listen rather than read. And that's why your tactics are always changing as you tell your story. But your story comes from the customers. Your story comes from the team members closest to the customers. And I would say that that's the most important part of simplifying what always starts out as a very complex Problem.

Speaker A: Now, you sort of answered this question leading into breaking down this methodology piece by piece. I want to ask you, what does sales led actually mean? I feel that vernacular, that phrase has been thrown around a lot and it's widely misinterpreted to a degree of ego or arrogance that may or may not come with your traditional sales archetype, where then they hear that and think they are commanding things, right? As opposed to functionally leading things, which are very different. So my first part of that question is, what does that actually mean internally inside an organization? How does sales lead? Right? And then how do they do that in a way that is actually finding alignment structurally inside that organization as opposed to, say, overpowerment inside that organization, which may lead to mismatched incentives and goals?

Speaker B: And you know, leading always relies on trust. And you've got to build trust with the sales team that the strategy is right. And the sales team, as they participate in building the strategy, they've got to demonstrate to all the other functions in the company that they can be trusted. How they, as the sales team build that trust is by delivering on promises, right? It doesn't mean that like every quota attainment is going to be more than 100%. It doesn't mean that the deal that was supposed to come in on Monday, that doesn't come in until Friday or even the next month. Those are things that just happen. You can never control what happens fully. You can only prepare as best as you can. And how you react to bad news is the really important part. In other words, bad news early is not bad news because you can adapt and do something about it. But being sales led, it starts for everyone else. In every other function in the company, you have to, whether you believe it initially or you don't believe it initially, you have to believe that selling is the hardest job on the planet and that all the other functions of the company are there to help the salesperson sell. Do they need a billing problem fixed? Do they need a new piece of collateral? Is there some competitor objection that's coming up in all their conversations? If the whole company centers around this idea of supporting the sales team and the sales team delivers on their promises that they make back to the organization that's a sales led organization and the best kind of CEO you can ever have, right? Some CEOs come up from an operations background, others come up from a finance background. The best CEOs on the planet come up from a sales background and it's because they understand how hard it is to be in front of the customer on the airplane or the train every single day, meeting with folks.

Speaker A: Do you think that most people in the world think that sales is the hardest job in these organizations?

Speaker B: No. And that's why I'm saying there's a lot of evangelizing of that idea at, uh, first. But the salesperson, whether they, they always go from hero to zero, whether you're measuring them monthly, quarterly, or annually, and what they did last month or last quarter or last year, they don't get credit for that. They only get credit for what they're doing now. Right. And if you're an engineer or you're a manufacturing person or you're a finance person, you're never under that hourly pressure to fix something. Like a salesperson is they're helping a customer fix a problem through the use of the company's products or technology. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: There's no other function in the company that has to do that in real time every hour of the day. And it starts to help the rest of the team understand that. I, uh, call it the other golden rule. The customer has the gold, and if we do a good job for them, they will share the gold with us for doing our job. But at the end of the day, they who have the gold get to make the rules and the customer gets to make the rules. And wordest. Aligning our resources, aligning our products to help the customer accomplish their business objective. And if you've got a sales background, CEO, they understand that inherently it's in their DNA and they know that helping a customer be successful will make the company be successful.

Speaker A: It's almost like we should instill mandatory service as a BDR for one year. Every person that joins your new organization, just so they what it's all about.

Speaker B: Amen. And it's, it's very hard to have

Speaker A: if you haven't done it before. People talk about it all day long, but people always assume that the salespeople are embellishing or exaggerating or being hyperbolic. And the work and the stress and the function that they have going on. But when you've done it before, you

Speaker B: know, it's an old movie, it's an old phrase, but that from Finding Nemo, when Nemo's just going around, just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. Right? That's what a salesperson has to do because they're facing objections every day, every hour. Everything we're talking about here, this is for business to business go to market. This is a B2B large account selling approach. Understand what the customer's Objectives are, align your products and technology to those objectives, do a great job, and it's the follow up. It's amazing that how many people will say they're going to do something and then end up not doing it. Uh, I always talk about. I, uh, jokingly say it's trillions of dollars a year, but I'll bet you there's trillions of dollars a year in the economy. That doesn't happen just because somebody says they're going to follow up and then they don't. You can be late on follow up. You could get an external factor that doesn't enable you to completely follow up. But if the customer sees that you're trying and that you're working in their best interest, they'll reward you with more business and therefore more revenues and profits.

Speaker A: Something I've really liked about speaking with you over the last couple of weeks, Trent, is so much of your success is seemingly founded on what I would consider, and probably most people would consider quite simple business best practices and professionalism, etiquette and just social, uh, courtesies inside of organizations.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And most people in today's world completely overlook those sort of things. I have a jiu jitsu coach that, uh, when I was starting out a couple of years ago, we're learning all the very simple tactics and wrestling moves and such and such. Right. And he can see people kind of rolling their eyes like, I've seen the guys on TV do this. And he left us with a phrase that I think was really interesting is we're not learning the basics because they're inherently basics. You're learning the basics, and they're called the basics because they work every single time. Not because they're easy, not because they're simple, because they work. Basic doesn't mean easy. Basic doesn't mean simple. It means they work every single time. Right. And these ideologies and philosophies you have about really just simple human psychology and selling. Right. That get overlooked so often I think are really interesting and clearly have led you to tremendous amounts of success. Right. Doing what you said you were going to do, showing up on time or early and not late, being nice to people. Right. And being a pleasant person to work with generally. You say that without saying that, and I find that really interesting.

Speaker B: Well, and it's, you know, people can get brave behind a keyboard.

Speaker A: Sure.

Speaker B: And that's why I always say, whether it's face to face or it's over video, you get so much brave biofeedback when you're face to face or over video that a keyboard just can't convey. And there's so much room for misinterpretation over a keyboard. Right, yeah. Selling, uh, is a social skill, period. Always, uh, has been, always will be. And people will buy from people they like. Sure, there's organizations behind those people, but at the end of the day, it's people doing business with people that they like doing business with because they can trust them to follow up and do a great job.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Um, as you're listening and you're doing those diagnostics, when you're in a new portfolio company, it starts out with, does everyone agree on who to target? Like the ideal customer profile? I've walked into so many organizations where they're. ICP is so broadly defined that it's kind of like saying, oh, well, we chase everything. Yeah, well, nobody's good at everything. And you can't. You don't have the money and the time to go chase everything. So can we define what you're best at? You gotta define as an organization, what are you best at in serving customers? And sure, you can do other things later, and you can take things that you do in a small way and do them in a big way later, but everybody's got to be on the same page of what are we good at? And that's the ideal customer profile of who we target. The why us and why now is the value proposition. In other words, through the use of the company's products, services, technologies. What's the business outcome from that? How you win. Coach Lou Holtz taught me this back in the early 90s. He said, Winning is about focusing on what's important now. What's important now. He goes, that's how you win. And in any given moment, you might have something you want to say, but you can usually pick up on the biofeedback that says, you know what, maybe that's not important right now, or maybe that's not even relevant to the discussion that we're having. Move on to what the person that you're storytelling to is most interested in. What's the offer? That's where pricing and packaging discussions come into play. When and where do you invest? Is this about direct sellers or is this about partnering with sellers? Whether that's distributors or manufacturing representatives or just other companies for part of your solution set, how do you reach prospects? That's what lead generation and website search engine optimization. And to even say SEO anymore, I feel outdated because it's all about how do you get placement in the AI engine results is what matters now, Right? Yeah. It's less about where are you on the page in traditional search now. It's all about the AI search results that are there. And ultimately, at the end of the day, you're setting up a measurement or a feedback system through KPIs and daily, weekly, uh, goals to achieve that says sales is going to deliver on the promise.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: And marketing and engineering and finance and operations are going to help them go do that.

Speaker A: Everything you're saying fills me with a lot of enthusiasm about the industry in the world moving forward in a time where right now everyone's very scared and hesitant is probably a better word because of the rise of AI being the most powerful technology in all of existence coming to full fruition. Right now they're worried about their jobs, they're worried about computers and robots taking over their functions, even in traditionally very anchored and highly social or human interactive interaction led jobs like sales and like marketing. But the way you break it down and what I'm sort of gleaning from that is those are tactical changes that have been happening, in a sense to different degrees every single month, every single quarter, every single day for the last 25, 30 years in the technology industry. But the psychology hasn't changed of the human mind, of how we buy, how we're courted, how we're impressed by things, how we value things, who we want to interact with and why. And probably thousands of years.

Speaker B: Well, right.

Speaker A: And everything's the same conceptually. It's just the tactics are changing and we just have to adapt to the new tactics.

Speaker B: Right. You know, if I look at when I went to school, which was in the late 80s and then kind of the first big scary thing, technology wise, that happened to the world. I remember, you know, Vinton Cerf, he's kind of one of the original creators of the Internet back in the day at darpa. Right. And things like email didn't exist. And the idea of you could be on a computer from your house or a boat or an airplane or a train, and you could connect to the rest of the world. Those were all Foreign Concepts in 1990. And just five years later, in 95, the whole world was on email. Everyone was using remote access and VPNs and business could be done anywhere, not just in the cube or the office in a high rise. And you know, as you look at the world weathering the pandemic, thank goodness things started back in the 90s such that when the pandemic happened, everything that was needed to work from anywhere was already Mature and developed and reliable. Maybe not as reliable as everybody wanted, but it worked to a degree. And I would say that the simplicity of doing a good job for people, if you use that as just a guiding principle of do good in the world, if you never tell a lie, that's a great thing. And by always telling the truth, you never have to remember the lies that you may have told along the way. I mean, you know, Mark Twain's famous for that line, right? Um, if you come at it with a spirit of service, the Jesuits kind of taught that to me in my education at Georgetown. If you do it in a spirit of service, you get a lot more cooperation, you get a lot more collaboration. And it's an easier process because people understand you're doing it to help them, you're not doing it to harm them, or you're not doing it just for your own benefit, you're doing it for their benefit.

Speaker A: Now, maybe to wind us down, I've got two other topics. Um, applying this across different businesses. I think it's really interesting. And you seemingly have done this better than anyone else that I've spoken to in these type of leadership positions. Back to Our original introduction, B2B. Software companies, technology services organizations, hardware companies, industrial companies. You told me a story about a lumber yard that you helped find tremendous growth within. It's incredible. People put themselves in silos from an industry and technology specialism standpoint very often nowadays and probably limit their own potential, right? By fixating their fascination or their career or their ideologies as, uh, something specific to that specific sector that they're within. You've proven that wrong time and time again. How have you done that?

Speaker B: It started with the core belief that I might not know the specifics, but I just fundamentally sit there and say, that doesn't mean it's impossible. And if you just walk into it with the idea of something that seems impossible, that can be possible. You can look at a sales organization and say, oh, my goodness, there's a lot of things wrong here. There's lots of opportunities for improvement. But you go back to structuring that sales organization for success. You look at business development representatives. They're the ones that are following up on leads in a timely fashion to kind of figure out where is somebody in a buyer's journey on figuring out do they want to invest in what you make. There's inside salespeople that are the person that's in the office and close to a phone all the time that the customer can always reach when they've Got a problem. Whenever that problem happens to arise, there's the outside salespeople that are the ones that are on the planes and trains and automobiles meeting with folks and post pandemic. The world has fallen in love again with going to events, actually shaking hands, sharing a beer are ah, back in force because it allows you to build a relationship that just will never be the same as over the screen, if you will. But no matter how challenging the particular situation might be, if you go into it saying, well, there's a possibility to make it better and we're going to measure how we make it better on a monthly and annual basis and as long as you keep incrementally making improvements, suddenly one year, two year, three years later, you may have taken a business that was losing money and now it's a business that's making money. It was a company that was shrinking and now the company is growing. It was a company that had poor customer satisfaction and net promoter scores and now suddenly they're ranking better than Apple on net promoter scores. Right. It starts with this very simple idea. There's nothing more important than the customer. Do a good job, be on time, follow up and don't tell lies.

Speaker A: Now the last piece that I'll um, hope for you to leave with us. I help find talents, primarily sales marketing executives, for lots of similar growth stage, private equity sponsored businesses all day in, day out. Everyone has a different ideology or methodology on what type of person, what archetype, what skill sets, what philosophy they bring to the table. Right. You seem to have figured it out very well. I could only assume from scaling the tremendous amount of businesses and diversity of businesses that you've been within over the years, what is your ideology on how to hire excellent leaders in those sales and marketing functions that can work in sort of the philosophy that you have here, either that it's intuitive to them or have a receptiveness to work and operate under it.

Speaker B: Right. Well, as I look at hiring executive peers, what I figured out over the years is the quantum computing capabilities of the mind.

Speaker A: Tell me more.

Speaker B: I mean, this is controversial when I say it every time I bring it up, but the female mind, from all directions at once, can handle 100 inputs and deliver outputs. And it's literally a quantum computing engine, the male brain. And I'm using myself as my own example. I can do one thing at one time in serial fashion. There's no parallel processing. I am that, you know, IBM PC from 1988 when it comes to can I do two things at once, you know, but A look for female talent on the executive team. And then when it comes to identifying sales talent and identifying marketing talent, look for the salesperson that wants to believe in what they're selling. And it comes out in every interview process. When you ask them, why did you work for the companies that you've worked for? And when they come back with an answer that they found a place where they believed in the offering, the product, the technology, the solution set, those are your best kind of salespeople because they've got a passion for making sure that their customer is going to be successful. Yeah. And that's what I would say when it comes to sales talent acquisition and

Speaker A: executive talent acquisition, I think that's phenomenal advice. Well, this has been a wonderful conversation and has quite a few gems inside it, Trent. So thank you for being willing to sit down, divulge the secrets of success that you've garnered over your career. Can the people find you for anything or is there anything else you'd like to add here at the end?

Speaker B: I would just say I'm always available and accessible through LinkedIn. There's a reason that Microsoft paid $26 billion for LinkedIn. Uh, it's an amazing professional database of how to contact people. So always feel free to reach out. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to tell my story. It's a simple story. Do a good job for customers, be sales driven, marketing assisted, deliver on promises and things work out well.

Speaker A: Thank you everyone for tuning in. It's another episode of the go to market kickback and we'll be back again soon.