Lessons in Adaptability and Success

Speaker A: Hi, this is Scott Olson. Welcome to another episode of True Confessions of a Sales Leader. I'm excited to introduce our guest today. Our guest is ryan George, founder CEO of SimpleView. SimpleView is a leading provider of CRM, CMS website design, and digital marketing for over a thousand destinations worldwide. Brian, I'd love to take a few moments if you could give us a little bit of your background and help us understand or tell us the story about how you founded SimpleView. What led to the inception of Simple View. What was the inspiration?

Speaker B: Sure. Well, first of all, thank you for having me, Scott. Pleasure to join you and your audience today. And yeah, jumping right into it. SimpleView was founded in 2001 after having worked in a governmental accounting firm through college to help offset my college expenses and pay my way through, really with the idea that I always knew I wanted to do something entrepreneurial. Never quite knew what that might be. But the experience that I had through school and the experience that I gained at the accounting firm and the relationships that I built led to an opportunity where myself, along with two partners, Scott Wood and Bill Simpson, were able to form a will do anything for money web development company. Way back then when database driven websites were pretty new, things like E commerce, whether it be Amazon or websites that people had of their own, ebay, all these things were just starting to come to life. And we found ourselves right at the beginning of it all, uh, as I say, we founded the company on the idea that we'd find our niche eventually. And, um, that meant that we worked with nonprofits or profits. Uh, again I mentioned, you know, someone would come in and say they saw this thing called ebay. We'd say $20,000 to build that. Uh, I saw this thing called Amazon, $20,000 to build that. And so we were young enough and naive enough and had enough, I guess, hard work in us to believe that we could build anything. Uh, it was during that time that we met the fourth partner in our business, which was a gentleman named Rich Reasons, who had happened to do a lot of work in the Convention and Visitors Bureau space. Um, and for those who aren't familiar with the Convention and Visitors Bureau is they're, uh, funded by a bed tax to bring leisure and business travel to a given destination. Uh, so websites like visitorlando.com, visit las vegas.com, those are all our work product. And then we power the back end of those websites as well and kind of the back office for those different customers. But in any case, we had been this will do anything for money. Web development company. We happened to have as one of our customers the Tucson CVB. And rich reasons it had a company called cvbtv.com where he was doing a lot of direct response television work. But specific to the CVB space, he started to get into web. Actually came to Tucson to pitch the CVB there on a new website. We were the incumbent and were invited to the meeting to hear Rich out and sort of said, we already do that. Go back to California. Uh, and lucky for us, we had the shared vision that we could do more together. Uh, we worked together on a handshake for five years and in 2006 formally merged our companies to create what's known as Simple View today. So I know there was a lot in that, you know, if you want to unpack of any, any of it, I'm happy to.

Speaker A: So you went from competitors to strategic partners. Did I get that right?

Speaker B: That's 100% accurate. Yep.

Speaker A: Well, this is exactly why I love founder stories. Because you never know what can lead to the beginning of a company or the twists and turns that they might take. Wow, that really took some creativity, open mindedness, opportunistic as well. Ah. At what point did you decide to go full speed ahead on your strategy in the destination marketing, um, convention bureau, uh, space, the event space. At what point did that take place in your evolution?

Speaker B: It's really been, you know, I, I joke, it's been, um, an overnight success. It just took 23 years. And so in my mind we've been full speed ahead since the very beginning and just kind of one foot in front of the other. But it was really when we made the decision to merge with Rich that Scott, Bill and I had to ask ourselves, okay, do we want to be a job shop and have, you know, really the flexibility to work on a lot of different types of projects or in, in formally merging with Rich, Focus on a given niche, become expert in it and you know, try and carve our own, you know, call it market dominant position within a smaller total adjustable market. And you know, obviously we chose that second path and, and that was right around 2006. So never, never looked back. I mean every single customer we've had since then has either been a DMO or cvb, occasionally a chamber of commerce. But really that's when the CVB and chamber are one and the same or tourism related, tourism m adjacent. So more recently we're getting involved with convention centers a little bit with economic development entities, but really all things that touch CVB's and DMOs. So we've been, you know, more laser focused on that ever since.

Speaker A: Well, it seems to have really paid off. You've, you know, you have such market dominance.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: In your space.

Speaker B: Yeah, about. About a thousand destinations worldwide and uh, in, in some way, shape or form. We work with about 650 in North America, which is, you know, 40 of the top 50, 90 of the top 100, um, 8 of the top 10. However you slice or dice it, we're working with most of the DMOs and CVBs out there today.

Speaker A: You've obviously had tremendous success. But take us back to the earlier days and what were some of the biggest challenges you faced and had to deal with?

Speaker B: Yeah, one of our biggest challenges early on, uh, which also was an opportunity, has been just managing personalities and being in a position to trust one another for these past 23 years. I often joke that I've been married to my partners longer than I've been married to my wife, and she may not like that one as much. But the fact of the matter is that few companies last as long as we do with four partners who've been able to work together for this long. So each of our skill sets have complemented each other really well. I've been more of a product and organizational design person, uh, rich reasons, who's one of our partners, is a dyed in the wool salesperson and has helped us with some of our biggest accounts. Bill Simpson is the Wozniak of Simpleview. He's the person who could design or build anything that we ever wanted to. And Scott Wood is a marine and his background in organizational leadership and, uh, you know, I'll call it command and control, really allowed us to complement each other really well. But you still have to manage your way through all of life's challenges, uh, make sure that everyone's carrying their low, their fair share of the load. And, you know, something that we still face today, but I think we've gotten better at it over time. You know, we. You also deal with the constraints associated with market timing and dynamics. Right. So we happen to be a travel tech company that started in February of 2001. Nine months later, airplanes hit buildings and we had to, um, adjust. Pretty easy to adjust for people from a resources perspective, um, but still can be difficult. We made our way through the 0809 financial crisis. Our customers budgets were getting hit, they were having to lay people off and we learned to work with them to help solve their problems in a way that endeared us to them, I think, and helped, uh, us to grow Even more through that. And then of course Covid again, travel was nearly decimated for a short period of time. And being a technology company, there was also the great resignation and a big movement from what was in office to remote. You know, all those things have been challenges, whether it was in the early days or you know, obviously more recently. And I think it's that mentality that just says, you know, get up the next day, put one foot in front of the other and you know, over enough steps you'll look back and know that you've accomplished quite a bit.

Speaker A: Yeah, the changes, I'm glad you touched on those with uh. 9 11. Yeah. 0809. And then of course the pandemic recently. How has your uh, general strategy's been the same it sounds like. But what about just kind of your competitive strategy and how's it evolved or had to change over time?

Speaker B: Strategy wise? I think we've become a lot more focused. You know, I started by talking about again, this will do anything for money, finding your niche, focusing in on it. Um, but even within the visitor economy or travel tech, there are so many opportunities that it's easy to get distracted. And I think the bigger you get or the further you get into your journey, the more focus becomes necessary. You know, we, we've expanded now internationally and for the longest time I'd say our strategy was go to conferences all over the world, try and find opportunities and if you can get a customer here and there, which as a result we have customers on almost every continent. But we've changed since then to be more focused in what we're doing and looking at those markets that are most similar to the US in terms of uh, structure and funding. And then looking at a buy build, partner strategy to determine how we can have people on the ground who not only understand the language and the culture, but understand politics, funding mechanisms and things like that. It was that more focused effort that led us to an acquisition of the closest thing to simple view that we had ever seen in a company called Tourism Media based in the UK. And uh, we acquired them in 2019, gave us a massive footprint in the UK which has allowed us to form a little bit of a beachhead into the rest of Europe. But we also recognize that all those things that I said still apply. Different funding sources, different structures, different politics, language, culture, etc. And so this past year we hired a managing director in Spain who is well known in that region and who can help us grow in that region versus kind of chasing everything that moves and uh, and Being distracted. So really, really long way, Scott, of answering your question. Just that I think to be successful today, we have to be more strategic and more focused. Whereas when there are just four of you, you can kind of go after anything until you find the things that are working best and hopefully get leverage from them.

Speaker A: Absolutely. You know, I'd like to think about or better understand how you align marketing, sales and customer success. Because one of the strengths and one of the people would love to have, uh, the amount of customers that you have. So customer success, ongoing customer success is a huge part of what you do, obviously. But how do you align the marketing, the selling and the customer success? And perhaps account, uh, management is maybe as a fourth element there. How do you align all those so they work together?

Speaker B: Yeah, great question. I, I, I'd add a fourth as well. Just in terms of product, uh, our product team spends a lot of time talking with stakeholders, whether it's prior to marketing, I guess.

Speaker A: Yeah, let's put product in there.

Speaker B: Perfect. Yeah, there's a lot of, a lot of gray area and a lot of people bucket them in different places. But, um, working with external stakeholders, whether it's prospective customers, obviously existing customers and even strategic partners, to understand how what we're building matches why we're building it and that it fits what our customers want and need. And, you know, it all starts there, right past that. Then, uh, it's about making sure that those things are as easy to implement and as easy to support as they possibly can be so that we're making the job of sales and customer success a little bit easier. It's never easy. I think, you know, the engineering folks probably think, oh, all they do is talk to customers all day. And I'm sure the people who talk to customers all day sometimes wish that they could shut their door and just focus and maybe not be bothered as much. But, uh, but it, it all has to work together really seamlessly, you know, in order to deliver for the customer. So, you know, kind of fundamentally, you know, obviously you need to acquire customers, but given the cost of acquisition, to get a new customer, just don't lose them. Uh, probably the metric I'm most proud of is that we have a 99 customer retention rate.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker B: So, and, yeah, and, uh, thanks. Ah, I think it's practically unheard of. But that's because we do what we can to treat customers as well as we possibly can and to surround them with the right resources. People sometimes will talk about how big Simpleviews gotten, and I use air quotes because we're really not that big a company at 450 people. Um, but we've maintained almost the exact same employee to customer ratio today as we had five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, which is about, you know, two to one. So for every employee, um, we have. We generally have two customers are put a different way. For every customer, uh, we have half an employee, you know, not dedicated exclusively to one customer because no half a person is going to know everything they need to know. Um, but we're able to spread the load. We're able to tap subject matter experts where necessary. You know, we will. We surround accounts with a variety of resources again, to make sure that they have everything that they need, and we make sure that our products and our tools fit them extremely well. You know, one change that we made a couple of years ago, you know, you mentioned account service, you know, account managers and customer success. Um, historically, the people that we had responsible for customer happiness, customer retention, and customer delight were the same people who are responsible for selling those customers more things. Two years ago, we separated those responsibilities so that, you know, people do want to be sold at times and they need to be sold because there are new things that we can offer. But we wanted to make sure that the line was very clear between I'm, um, helping you or I'm selling you and when we had one role responsible for both, it made it hard for them to be emphatic about the fact that they're helping. And when the opportunity arises, I'll sell you something. Um, but now they can help, help, help, and then refer over to a growth director who can walk someone through a new solution or tool and then, um, upsell it, so to speak, in our case going forward. So, you know, again, that's again, a long, maybe winded way of saying that there's just handoffs from, I'd say product to marketing and back and forth, um, marketing to sales and back and forth, sales to operations and back and forth, and then operations to customer success and back and forth. So, um, everyone understanding where they fit in the value chain and, um, making sure they do their part and don't drop the handoff, uh, has proven to work well for us.

Speaker A: Yeah. Well, hopefully the selling is helping, but is the customer in that mindset? Right. And I'm glad you brought that up. That differentiation in that line between customer success and then. Okay, additional services that of course we're looking to provide, but making sure the customer success helps them succeed with what they already have.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And to make sure it's appropriate and they're open to it.

Speaker B: Yeah, Terry Roberts and Shimo, um, Christine Shimasaki on our team. They're believe they're Marriott trained, but they talk about making deposits. So anytime you're interacting with a customer, you're making deposits, which means you're putting your best foot forward, you're going the extra mile, you're helping to solve their challenge, whether it's, you know, directly related to you or not. And the hope is that in turn you earn renewals, you earn loyalty, and maybe you earn an opportunity to sell something new when the time comes.

Speaker A: Absolutely, yeah. Earning it, not foisting ideas or, uh, you know, solutions when they're not open to it.

Speaker B: Right, that's right, yeah.

Speaker A: Yeah. Such an important component. Okay. Really appreciate that. I want to take a step back now and think about your leadership. The company's evolved. It's gotten, you know, it's was websites and then CRMs and I mean, what a competitive market that is. I just heard some numbers just over the, over the weekend on another podcast. Like I think it was close to 400 CRMs out there. And website developers, I mean, it's gotta be unlimited. So that, that focusing in, made all the difference and just to really, to dominate and serve your market. And that 90% success rate, uh, is, is fantastic, keeping your clients happy. But how is your leadership grown and evolved over the last 20 plus years?

Speaker B: Yeah, you know, I think a lot about that. Um, you know, and I describe my role as jack of all trades, master of none sometimes. I know I mentioned earlier that I'm kind of the product person, but, you know, when you're company of 4 and then 20 and then 50 and then 100 and then 400, um, you wear a lot of hats and I've always enjoyed that. But I think as a leader, I've evolved to resist the urge to go fight every fire or get involved in every department. Uh, you know, because there was a time where maybe I thought I could do it best. I think with maturity and experience. I know I've hired people who can do it better, but I still have to fight that from time to time. And I think part and parcel with that is trying to be as clear as I can possibly be about not only what I say, but what I mean. Um, I think that oftentimes. Yeah. And as demonstrated by this podcast, I can think out loud or be overly verbose. And sometimes people don't know if that's guidance or if that's direction or if I'm just brainstorming. So sometimes I'll even start a conversation with, I'm not telling you to go do this. I just wonder what it would, what the result would be if we did. X. Right. Because if, uh, I'm not clear sometimes, you know, something will happen and I'll say like, you know, why'd you go do that? Well, you told me to. No, I didn't tell you to. We were just having a conversation kind of a thing. But, you know, I think that with more, you know, as you get bigger and there's more structure and hierarchy and, you know, command and control, if you will, you recognize that there may be people earlier in their career who they, they want to make their boss happy and they certainly want to make the head of the company happy, you know, so they'll, you know, leap sometimes when all you're asking them to do is look over the edge.

Speaker A: Yeah. Just think about it.

Speaker B: Yeah. So just getting better about that all the time. Taking time to work on strategy or to educate yourself or to learn. Because, you know, again, if, if yes, I've taken to talking to my direct reports and one of the things that I've said lately is, you know, what, what is it that you do between answering customer phone calls and emails? Because I think if all the emails stop and you, you know, pause the phone for four hours, whatever it is you find yourself doing, that's your actual job. Huh. The other stuff's just things that, you know, kind of get in the way. Or sometimes they're things that we do to keep ourselves busy. Because the hard thing might be researching a, you know, researching a new market or, you know, writing that strategic plan that you've been sitting on for months. Or sometimes it's just picking up the phone and calling a customer proactively. Uh, and you put it off sometimes because the easier thing is just to let yourself get mired in email and float around on LinkedIn, respond to those messages. So again, just, just being cognizant of that and recognizing that, you know, sometimes you just need busy work to, you know, take your mind off things. But, but at other times, you have to know where the busy work stops and the important work begins and making sure that you schedule the time to do those bigger things. Again, those things are probably super obvious to a lot of people, but they're things that I've had to learn over time.

Speaker A: Absolutely. Uh, yeah, we're not robots. But being purposeful, thoughtful, and, hey, this is kind of time I'm going to relax. And that's okay. I'm aware of it. It's not taking over my whole day.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker A: What do you look for characteristics, behavior in your sales and marketing leadership. And those might be two different things. Those are two different, two different roles.

Speaker B: But what do you look for? Yeah, I see them as two separate things in sales follow up. You know, I think we, we've all known the person and, and it doesn't mean that this person can't also be a great salesperson. They obviously can. But you know, I think we over index sometimes to the person who's fast on their feet, who's what people stereotypically think of a fast talking, charming salesperson. Uh, and that, but I really look for the person who follows up. Uh, they're going to beat, they're going to beat the flashy salesperson. You know, nine times out of 10, again, both isn't bad. But I'll take diligent follow up over flash every day. And that means making sure that they're putting their traces into the CRM platform, that if they get an inquiry, that they're quick to determine if there's a fit or not, that they're returning phone calls very quickly, that they're responsive to questions or changes that may come come up in an RFP process. Again, just you know, hyper diligent in that way and similar in marketing because you know, marketing has purview into product like we had talked about before. They also have a lot of analytical responsibilities when it comes to marketing and even marketing ops and then from a marketing ops perspective, even helping the sales ops side. So in that I think it's you know, data minded, task oriented, you know, follow up oriented individuals from, from both marketing and sales. But, but especially in that vein from sales. And it goes for every position though, I think too is that always looking for people that are, you know, friendly. You know, there's, there's not room for working with people you don't get along with and they're often the face of your company. So you want them to embody your company's core values. You know, probably more than almost anyone else in the organization on this, you know, and it, and, and of course if you lump in customer success, which we do with sales, they're the face, you know, they, they are the marketing in and of themselves. So, and, and in that just great leadership by example. So you know, for us we have a relatively small new business team. We only have five people worldwide dedicated to new business.

Speaker A: Uh-huh.

Speaker B: But we have 40 dedicated to customer success. Uh, so, but those 40, you know, have to Learn from their boss, who learns from their boss, who, you know, hopefully ultimately learns from our chief revenue officer. So they've got to check all the boxes, not just some, um, it's always

Speaker A: a good sign when you have a much larger customer success team. Well, what you're describing, the follow up endurance comes to mind. There's a writer, Cal Newport, he wrote a book just came out recently called Slow Productivity and it's about. He also wrote a book called Deep Work, where that follow through, that being able to really, to really concentrate can make all the difference in the world.

Speaker B: Yeah, I've read Deep Work.

Speaker A: Uh, oh yeah, this is his newest. Yeah, on that. It's uh, yeah, it's really what you're describing there with that steady approach.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: Slow and steady wins the race. It's fine to make a great impression. We want a great first impression. Right. But we've gotta have the follow through, otherwise it doesn't, doesn't pan out.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, you're, you're wasting a lot of good first impressions. Ah.

Speaker A: Uh, yeah, good point, good point. Well, let's take a step, look to the future a little bit more. What trends are you seeing paying special attention to?

Speaker B: Well, uh, I think it's always been said, but the world's changing faster today than it ever has before. And as quickly as the world became very data focused, it became AI focused even faster. So I think AI is a bit of a cop out. I think there's a lot of work still left to do in all aspects of business leadership really taking advantage of data. And again, maybe that's even sort of obvious. But when we look at how we measure customer success even today, it's different than it was a year ago. When we look at the metrics that we're using from a marketing perspective or a sales operations perspective, you know, the data that we're evaluating today is very different than it was again even a year ago. But those aren't skills that we were all taught. And so it becomes hard for everybody to adopt them. I think, you know, when I think about, you know, new C suite leaders or aspiring C suite leaders, they often don't have a lot of financial acumen or certainly they can balance their checkbook and they pay their bills and, you know, they're good, you know, stewards of their own money. But, you know, reading a profit and loss, understanding a balance sheet, looking at cash flow, managing a budget, a lot of people don't get that training. And then you take that, you know, much, much deeper to KPIs okrs and data analysis. And you know, I think 99% of people use 1% of what Excel is capable of much less than diving into more sophisticated tools than that. So, you know, it's again a long way of saying that I'm very focused on making sure that our people have a data mindset and that they are constantly getting new training and education about how to leverage data for good decision making. And we're, you know, we continue to work hard to take that same mindset and educate our customers. You know, when we started, and uh, we might have mentioned it on this podcast, but we were a web development company so it meant building public facing websites, you know, for users to do things with largely find aspirational content or be inspired to take a vacation. And that gave way to a generation of, call it webmasters. You know, when we were selling our first websites, our customers didn't have anyone dedicated to managing their website and that became a job. Then in time, as we came online with our CRM platform, CRM administrator became a new job. Running reports, getting at the data, helping salespeople to understand, you know, where their opportunities lie or measure their performance for their boss. Kind of in between the data revolution, there was the social media revolution. And I remember a CEO saying to me, all this Facebook, Twitter stuff, it just all seems like stuff that kids are doing. Do I really need to focus on it? And of course I think it'd be hard pressed to find a CVB today that doesn't have a social media manager. Well now that's going to data. And so data analytics folks, people who understand data are some of the most in demand jobs that exist today because it's applied to every other discipline in one way or the other. So we're paying special attention to that. We know we have to keep an eye, not, uh, just keep an eye on, but start integrating AI into everything that we do, both internally as a company, but then into our products. And that's not going away. It's uh, a sea change in shift as big as the Internet was itself. And I'm not usually one to go that route. I'm more of a, uh, slow and steady wins the race kind of a person and sometimes things get blown out of proportion. But these tools bring new capabilities in ways that we haven't seen in a very long time. So. No, but again, I imagine anyone would say AI. So I'm going to stick with my first answer, which is being really focused on data as a trend.

Speaker A: Well, I guess they, they to some, some ways go Hand in hand as, uh.

Speaker B: Well, they do. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. You know, but I. I had an interesting conversation with one of these large language models recently and started asking, and this one happened to be chatgpt, but I know, you know, and there are obviously several out there, but was really interrogating it for what do humans do better than AI? Uh, and I was surprised I don't have it right in front of me, but it was a really intriguing answer, and the summary of it was creativity. So large language models are obviously much, much better at assimilating massive quantities of data. So, you know, to your point, there is an overlap between data and AI, but what they aren't as good at is true insights. Or that aha, uh, moment. Or that light bulb that goes off that says, you know, I think I've got a great idea, I'm going to go do something about it in the real world. They can't do that yet. I know, I know. They can build videos, they can write music, they can write poetry, they can create images. All that's being created from work that humans have done. And then when they're done, they're not necessarily a great judge of what's that inspiration that leads to action. And that's where I think the human component continues to come into play from data, because we can all read reports till we're blue in the face. But what's the thing that you see in that report that says, okay, I know what I need to do about that? Whether that's something that you need to change from a product perspective, including go to market perspective, a customer engagement perspective, an organizational design perspective, how do you need to empower your team with new learning or new tools to go serve customers better? They haven't beaten us yet. But. But yeah, it's that. It's that airplay, right? I think it's, it's data, AI and humans that make a lot of that work.

Speaker A: Yeah, I've heard. I think it was a McKinsey leader say, is it overhyped? Yes. Will it be, uh, the most amazing changes? Yes, as well. So it's both.

Speaker B: Exactly. Right.

Speaker A: One or the other.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Other, you know, other trends. You know, I've had a hard time in my career putting too much credence into generational differences. You know, in my mind, I've had, you know, if you want to say boomers, and I'm a Gen Xer and, you know, Gen Z or millennials and Gen Z. I've always said that I've had extremely hard working, very thoughtful People in each of those generational categories. I've had lazy, you know, not so good people in each of those generational categories. So I've spent a lot of time working hard to ignore them. But, uh, with kids of my own, I have two girls and a boy and, and, uh, My girls are 16 and 15 and my son's 11. I'm coming to appreciate the fact that they just see the world very differently than my wife and I do. And that's helped me to, I think, recognize that there's probably some other nuances between 17 and 49 that I may have overlooked and need to focus more on. So, uh, and, and that's everything from hybrid work. You know, uh, 20, 19, like never would have crossed my mind that we wouldn't be in the office five days a week, at least 40 hours a week, whereas today where three days a week required and the other two optional if you live within 30 miles in an office. And I never would have guessed that more than 50% of our workforce was remote. And again, there are kind of generational implications that I think go with that and have to be more mindful of today than we've ever had to be in the past. And I think that's a trend, so to speak, that we're all, all contending with.

Speaker A: Uh, how has that affected how you sell?

Speaker B: Yeah, um, because our customers are destination marketing organizations, they for the most part, were much quicker to return to office. I think. I've heard a lot of leaders say the people who make the beds, the people who serve the meals, the people who greet someone at a hotel, they can't work from home, so we're not going to either. And we serve those customers, you know, and we serve the DMOs and CVBs. So, you know, we've adopted a more in office mindset than most companies would. And, you know, it's just then been a matter of communicating to our staff why that's important for us. Again, we're hybrid. We have a massive amount of flexibility. But, uh, you know, it's just meeting your customer where they're at too, because it's not okay or fair. I think if they're subject to one set of rules and we're subject to completely different set. But so, so from a selling perspective, I think it's just identifying with them. I'm sure there are plenty of people who work at CVBS who maybe are in that younger demographic, maybe not. We're like, why do I have to work from the office? Because all my friends get to work from Home. So just, you know, that's been one aspect of it. But, uh, but still, I mean, you know, you've seen the statistics. I mean, business travels nearly back to where it was pre Covid conferences and trade shows. Attendance is, you know, back to or above where it was in some cases before COVID Which just goes to show that face to face beats virtual all the time. So from a sales perspective, and I know that's your focus, um, we've leaned into trade shows and events, you know, so that we could make up for lost time in seeing customers face to face. One of our big goals for this year is to get to know each other and our customers better than we have before. So we're instituting new programs where, because we're hiring a lot of remote staff, if we happen to be a train to happen to be. Do it happen to be doing a training, let's say in Georgia? Well, do we have any staff who's never met a CVB customer before, living in Georgia, uh, and bringing a developer or a designer who doesn't happen to be assigned to a. To that account, Bring them to the training in the meeting so that they can see our customers in their own environment using our tools and in doing so, um, you know, meet some of their peers that they might not otherwise see or meet. So just again, working hard to make sure we connect face to face any opportunity we get, whether it's internally or as you say, from a sales perspective, especially when it's external.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, remote's a nice option, but nothing beats in person. I agree totally. We have a PDX sales leadership group that we've been running since 2008. And, uh, we went remote for a little while and we just said, hey, we're going to meet in person again. That's just. There's something special about that whenever you can. So. Yeah, that's fantastic. Well, I'd love to get your final thoughts here. The final question on what could you share with other CEOs, sales leaders in particular, to, uh, help create a culture where sales teams can excel?

Speaker B: Well, again, making sure that they're armed with the best products, tools and services in order to serve their customers best, uh, is pro. That's obviously a good start. I also think, you know, putting them in positions where they're sort of in the foxhole together. There's a. There's a great book on organizational tension and organizational design. I have to go pull it off my bookshelf, to quote it. Maybe we can share it in post or something. But there's a natural dynamic between sales and product, sales and operation, sales and marketing, operations and product. Right. Because this is exaggerating to make a point. But oftentimes sales wants more and more and more marketing materials because it'll make it easier for them to sell something or more campaigns or more trade shows that they're generating leads at and they want more leads. Marketing gets to a point oftentimes where they say, look, I've given them everything that they need, they should be selling. That's, you know, they're the ones who have the problem. But putting marketing and sales together under our chief revenue officer has created, you know, what's been referred to as a single throat to choke. So if sales isn't happy with what marketing is delivering or marketing isn't happy with what sales is delivering, they're on the same team and they basically can go argue into a mirror if they choose to similar from a marketing and product perspective. Putting marketing and product very close to one another so that they're getting that, you know, market feedback and they can work on the why together. Sales and operations. Uh, one of the things I'd say we're very focused on is yield based sales. So you know, if, if sales, again, exaggerating to make a point, had their way, they would sell things as inexpensively as humanly possible on the shortest time frame possible because that's going to make selling an initiative that much easier. Well, what does operations want to. They want the biggest budget possible and the longest timeline possible because it maximizes their ability to deliver in time. So putting them in a position to find that balance, especially when you have a constrained total, addressable market, becomes really important. So, um, we're measuring salespeople not just on revenue generation, but also on profit. That that way we don't sell ourselves into oblivion.

Speaker A: Well, uh, yeah, being a CEO is a balancing act and you've obviously done that very, very well over the years and really appreciate your perspectives and the stories and just the insights to share with our audience today. Ryan, thank you very much.

Speaker B: Thank you, Scott.

Speaker A: Thanks for listening to my conversation with Ryan George, founder and CEO of SimpleView. Ryan mentioned a book on organizational design titled Designing Organizations to Create Value from Strategy to Structure. Ryan's found this book helpful in thinking about good and bad organizational tension and how to harness it. If you enjoyed today's episode, please follow the show on Spotify or subscribe in your favorite podcast app. And if you're looking to accelerate the growth of your business, I invite you to reach out out to me directly. You can email me at scott@owlsengroup.net or call me directly at 503-525-8866. Thanks again for listening.