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- [00:01]
A
Hey, welcome back for another episode. I'm recording this on the last day of January, which makes me sort of sad because January is my favorite month. I love New Year's and I love everything that comes with turning a new page and starting a new chapter. I always spend this month doing some visioning and legit vision boards and I also do scrapbooking for the year with my family, which is super fun but also always takes a lot of time. So I hope that you've enjoyed your season. And as things start to ramp up with sales kickoffs coming, we thought it would be appropriate to bring on Matt Green of Sales Assembly. Matt is the CRO and he brings some really spicy hot takes around how marketing and sales can better align to drive the ultimate goal of revenue. We talk about attribution and credit wars. We talk about sales tactics and selling in 2026. There's a lot of great, juicy stuff in this ep, so I hope you'll stick around. But before we get into that, make sure that you check out our monthly workshops. Our monthly workshop in January was lit and we have one in February as well. So go to pesetto.com events and make sure to get that on your calendar. All right, let's get into it. You're listening to GTM Live, a podcast by Passetto. Hey, welcome back to GTM Live. This is Amber here today with a very special guest who I'm going to introduce real quick. But before we get into that, I hope everyone had a good January with all the snowstorms in the northeast and I know Matt, our amazing guest today. We had to reschedule this because everybody was snowed in and we got kids going on. So my kid is actually home today because his teachers are on strike. So just a lot going on but happy to be here and I'm super excited to have Matt Green here today. If you don't know Matt, Matt is the co founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Sales Assembly. Sales assembly is a household name, but you might not know all about them. So they're actually a skills based training platform that's become the go to resource for over 200 of the best B2B tech companies. Matt is unique in that he's not just a CRO in title, he's actually still working deals and that keeps him connected to the front lines every day. Since launching sales assembly in 2017 as a bootstrap company in Chicago, Matt and his co founder Jeff Rossett have built a community driven learning platform where current operators train other revenue leaders on the skills that actually matter right now. Matt is also a social selling powerhouse on LinkedIn, which we will get into towards the end of the episode here today. And he's my personal go to for refreshingly honest, no bullshit takes on what it takes to sell and be remembered today in B2B sales. So thank you so much for being here, Matt. It means a lot that you accepted my invitation. Welcome to GTM Live.
- [03:23]
B
Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Amber. I'm really excited for the conversation. Yeah.
- [03:28]
A
So what's been going on, man? I know we chatted a few weeks ago, just briefly, but you've got, you know, a call that you just came on. Hot off of this. It's early in the morning for you in Chicago. You've got another call. You're going to. So it sounds like things are heated up for Sales assembly. And it's also sales kickoff season. So how does that impact you and your world?
- [03:49]
B
Yeah, well, to your point, it's never a dull moment over here at Sales assembly, but that's the way we like it. It's better than not being busy, right? At least this means that we're in business. So I'll take what I could get. It is definitely in the depths of SKO season right now, I presume like any other seller or any other organization that sells into revenue leaders, the big thing right now is just all around calendaring and timing, right. And you know, things may be getting conversations and proposals and deals maybe getting pushed back a little bit further along than we may have initially hoped just because people are going to Rome or to Mexico or to Vegas or, you know, all of these big things and rolling out force management or medic or medpic. So again, it's an occupational hazard. But this is stuff that we plan for during the first two or three months of every year.
- [04:39]
A
Yeah, that makes sense. And I can just imagine through some of the programming that you put out at Sales assembly, there's a lead up to this as well, right? Because just to sort of double click on what you do at Sales assembly, you have programs for sellers, boots on the ground, you have programs for executive leaders. So how does that show up in terms of even just walking it back a few months, what annual planning looks like, how does that show up for you and how you show up to support your customers?
- [05:10]
B
Yeah, it's an interesting question. You know, our focus at Sales assembly, as you alluded to during your generous introduction, is really just around the core, fundamental skills training. Right. So to be clear, you know, we're not coming in and building a sales process like Medic or Medpic. And we're not instituting a methodology like Challenger or anything. Our whole thesis behind launching this was if you are an AE, a BDR, a CSM at any B2B tech company, be it Affirm or G2 or Stripe or Gong, whatever the case may be, you're going to be selling different products to different people. But the fundamentals of how you do it that make you successful are pretty much all the same, right from company to company. And by that I mean good storytelling is good storytelling, good negotiation is good negotiation. Good multi threading best practices are good multi threading best practices. These are the types of things we focus our training on week in and week out. So that the benefit of that is that it sort of transcends any sort of, you know, moment in time initiatives, you know, like an SKO coming up. Because no, I mean your BDRs are still on the phones this week, right? So they still need to be good at cold calling. They still need to be competent in drafting more compelling emails. That's the focus of our training. So again, it does sort of transcend anything that might be going on within any organization at the much more strategic level at that time.
- [06:36]
A
Yeah, that makes sense. And this is what I admire about you so much Matt, is that it's just like straight to basics what really matters, right? Not talking about all these tactics and tech stacks and stuff around. What does it really take to be an amazing seller? So we're going to get into that and I have a ton of questions for you about what that means. We're also going to cover some juicy topics around credit wars between go to market teams, how to build pipeline, what you're seeing actually work right now in the market and then yeah, just like a lot more around the back to basics and forecasting and how do you actually make it work when there's so many things that you can focus on on any one time and really understanding for your business specifically what's working. And so I know you just have this amazing vertical view from the ground level all the way up to your experience as a CRO and bootstrapping your business. That we are really excited, I'm super excited to dig into. So let's get into it. So the first thing I want to talk about is credit wars. This has been coming up a lot for us at Pesetto more and more as we really put our finger on and really like press into this oozing wound which is attribution models and Credit and what we hate personally, not that you have to hate it, Matt, but we hate the four funnel model that pits teams against each other and just really not effective or efficient for businesses to grade their marketing and sales teams based on who sourced what because it just doesn't really tell a real story. But since you are an incredible sales leader and oftentimes we have more of a marketing heavier perspective or maybe a rev ops heavier perspective on the show, I want to ask from your perspective, what is going on here? So, so many of the marketing leaders that we work with are stuck in that constant battle over who gets credit for pipeline and they're actually like bound and shackled by the outdated attribution models and needing to like prove. So I know sales feels this too. Having worked, you know, alongside a lot of revenue leaders like yourself. It's like everybody feels it, but there's this distrust that kind of seeps in. And from my perspective, it's something that I think teams more deal with emotionally day to day and grapple with at like the independent contributor and then maybe like the management layer. But leadership is not stressed about that part. They just want to know what's working and what's not. But also the bad habits get perpetuated by leadership. And I think unknowingly sometimes, or just not really having other tools, these situations get actually perpetuated because we're not giving teams tools to be able to do anything else. So I want to ask you about this. The customer gets the credit philosophy that you subscribe to. Can we talk about that?
- [09:53]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I would say you mentioned something a moment ago. As far as, you know, leaders, you know, they obviously caring about credit and what's working and what's not working, that's what they're looking at. You know, I think the problem, at least from my vantage point, is a byproduct of what's working versus not working. We should be focused on what's closing versus not closing. Right. And taking a step back, I think that this whole ongoing attribution argument, it only exists because we've created systems where marketing and sales have competing scorecards. Marketing gets measured on MQLs or pipeline generated. Sales of course gets measured on closed revenue. Right. So of course, you know, when you have these competing scorecards, I mean, naturally they are going to start fighting for credit. And that's why, you know, when people start having these conversations about attribution modeling, and I'm not a marketer to your point, I'm coming at this through looking through a very specific sales focus lens. And also, not only am I not a marketer, not really that smart either, so I do tend to dumb this down. I'm like, why don't we just focus on shared revenue accountability? Right. When both teams have the same number, and the same number being revenue, not pipeline, not MQL's. I mean, the attribution question just kind of falls by the wayside. Right?
- [11:21]
A
It really does.
- [11:22]
B
Yeah. You know, you know what happens when. Yeah, when deals close, nobody argues about who touched them. Seventh. Right. So, you know, why not just dispense with all of this and just again, as a collective focus on revenue as opposed to having competing scorecards, which is always. Despite how much organizations try to build a different type of culture, when you have teams that are ostensibly supposed to be focused on the same goal, but are measured in different ways, it's always going to lead to some level of friction.
- [11:55]
A
Yeah, absolutely. That was very eloquent of you. And I guess if you're saying you're not smart, maybe you don't have to be smart. Maybe you just have to be super effective.
- [12:06]
B
Yeah. You know, sales is a dumb person's game. So again, I'm square within my zone, man.
- [12:12]
A
I love sales and I love it more and more in my role at Pesetto. So appreciate you sharing these nuggets of insight for me and, and everyone listening. So you. Yes, and I want to break this down because I think that there's two buckets of leadership with go to market and revenue. And there's the bucket that listens to this show. Very forward thinking, very like, hey, I don't give a shit about the status quo. Like, I'm here to be excellent for my company and grow my career, willing to push the limits, push the envelope, just looking for, you know, frameworks and tactics and best practice to be able to do that and not, you know, just put your neck out there and like fall flat. Right? So there's that bucket and then there's another bucket that I've seen in my career, which is leadership that is really not equipped with the information or the data to be able to make decisions. And so I think the way that shows up is this, like overreliance on like really ground level, like in the weeds, data that like, they can control it. Like attribution is something that you can kind of point to and control. But this unwillingness to say, hey, at a high level, is my business growing. Am I efficient? What's my ltv? What's my payback period? At a High level. And then I think it's because they lack that information or they lack that holistic view to be able to tie it back from finance, sales, marketing to revenue around is what I'm spending like working out, am I growing? You know what I mean? And so if you're not able to look at it from that level, then of course you're going to be in the weeds nitpicking every single little thing because you don't know what actually is happening in your business or where you're falling short. And so that's how I see it. And I'm happy to have you here as an example of the former, if.
- [14:07]
B
You don't mind just me saying, you know, I think that's right on it. And it goes back to something you alluded to early on in the conversation around, you know, all the tools that we have available. And that's what's bonkers about it. You know, we're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on tech stacks. They're trying to prove which touchpoint caused in air quotes a deal when the truth is that you can't. Right. You know, you can isolate causation in a system with eight to 12 buying committee members, six month plus sales cycles and touch points happening across every channel that you can't even track. Right. So again, I just always come back to this mindset of like, what does it matter, right? You know, again, going back to the shared goal of being revenue, why are we spending all this money, time and stress trying to say like, well, no, no, no, I mean, you know, touch point number seven on this email, like, you know, this webinar attendance. So this white paper download is what actually attributed the deal. I think that we're getting too into our heads about these types of things. Which again goes back and I'm sorry to sound like a broken record, all stems from the fact that for some reason we still want to measure marketing in a very specific way and in my opinion, coming from a sales perspective, a relatively unfair way. Because there's so much that happens on the marketing side that regardless of how much money or time or tools you throw at the problem, it's just going to be unquantifiable.
- [15:37]
A
Yeah, unquantifiable in a way that you can directly say this was the thing. Right. But to push back on that slightly, what we also see is there's two camps of marketing leaders. There's the camp that says, hey, I know that attribution is the wrong answer to the question that we're trying to get asked, right, like what's leading to close 1. Revenue. Like attribution is like this thing that you can use, but it's not going to answer that question. And so they want something else, right? And they're looking for something else. Or they're coming up with creative systems to show marketing influence and sales, you know, influence. And then there's another camp, not to be too binary here, but again, this is what we see at a high level other camp of marketing leaders which says, hey, actually you can't measure marketing at all and there's no use in trying to measure it, which can't be measured and shouldn't be measured. And marketing should not be held tied to revenue. And that's just not how marketing works. And that's flat out wrong. You absolutely can measure influence to revenue and you should not stick your head in the sand. But again, this is the polarity of the response that we see from these broken systems. So it's awesome to hear that you see it too, because there's a little bit of a stereotype about, you know, sales being like in their own world and they don't care, they just want credit or, you know, want to close deals. But that's not true.
- [17:08]
B
Yeah, I would agree. And that is very fair pushback. I think it also ties back into something. I think you use the term forward thinking, you know, when you're talking about marketing leaders and sales leaders, leadership in general. And I think that that is, you know, the right on term. And it does significantly tie back into, again, how we should think about attribution. If we do truly want to be forward thinking, why are we focused on trying to measure what worked in the past? The market's constantly moving. Your ICP might be continuously evolving. Your competitors change their positioning. So in my opinion, the question should not be what touchpoint caused this deal. The question should be what do our best customers have in common and how do we go find more of that? That in my mind is for looking.
- [17:58]
A
To a T. Wow, that's so insightful. So to say that back in my own words, what I'm hearing from you is that this is an ever evolving answer and an ever moving target. And you're lucky if you can just keep your finger on the pulse of what's happening from month to month and quarter to quarter. And that's striking to me because I haven't thought about it that way, Matt. And I feel like this is related to the acceleration of AI and technology. And I hear in these conversations a lot around AI is Changing so fast, you know, every month there's new capabilities. And so if you're an AI company, you're having to find product market fit every month, every quarter. Right. Because you're constantly having to re establish yourself with the capabilities that are there. But what I'm hearing for you is that that's not just an AI thing. That's actually just how the pace of change that we're living in today.
- [19:00]
B
Yes, correct. But I also think it's correct building AI on top of that. Because AI, even if you're not an AI company, AI in general is just making everything move quicker. Whether it is, again, you know, the competitive landscape or I think, you know, just as importantly, if not more importantly right now, buyer behaviors. Right. How are buyers doing research, how are they finding you, how are they coming across you, how are they evaluating you versus competitors? So yes, there is always this sort of moving target. And I think that AI, just all across the board has been the proverbial gasoline that's just been poured on top of this fire.
- [19:39]
A
Yeah. Wow, that gives me a lot to think about. I hadn't thought about it like that before. Yeah, it's just permeating everything. So given that, what are you seeing that works to build pipeline in 2026? So just for some context on, again, what we see at Pasetto, there is so much grasping at straws. And again, I think this comes from leadership and this sometimes misguided, sometimes not pressure to build volume. And so we see volume targets still are just a huge problem. Chris Walker popularized the MQL hamster reel on the marketing side, like ever churning out MQL volume as your North Star. There are other volume metrics that we see cause huge problems as well in terms of just number of leads. And so from if, for example, in sales development, we still see SDR BDR teams that are managed based on activity. How many calls did you make, how many meetings did you book? And then there's this huge void that we call the pipeline black box between, oh, the outreach was initiated or the meeting was booked, and then the revenue that came from that. And again, we got to put that attribution issue in there, obviously oversimplifying everything, but there's just so many things. It's like whether you're on the sales team or a marketer, you're just constantly like grasping at, oh, let's do this, let's do this versus looking at, well, actually there's really only three to five things that are working really well, but you don't really Know what those are? Or maybe you don't have the data or the confidence to stick your neck out and say no to other things. So I know that was a lot of like, we're bombing about what we're seeing, but what are you seeing that's working to build. Build pipeline.
- [21:27]
B
Yeah. And I'm admittedly going to be painting with broad brush strokes here because I understand that, you know, different motions, you know, transactional versus enterprise, different buyers, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But writ large, we have seen a increased focus and, you know, much higher level of success over the past few quarters. And that seems to be extending into 2026 on finding ways to get in person. Right. And not necessarily through big trade shows and conferences, but small events, you know, micro events, more travel, just to prospects and clients, you know, geographical areas. And it all stems from going back to AI. I mean, we all know that inboxes forever have just been inundated with spam, you know, for the past five, six, seven, eight years. The problem now with AI is that emails that you receive today that were written pretty much end to end with AI, they look like emails from two years ago. If you got an email, you're like, wow, this is like a really thoughtful, well worded, well researched email that was handcrafted and probably at the time did take a good hour to put together by rep. Now that's done in minutes, right? So when an executive, a buyer's inbox is not only filled with more emails, but more emails that all look fantastic, by and large, it's like you still end up in the same place. It's just noise too much. We saw as a response to this, we saw cold calling making a big resurgence a year, year and a half ago. But now with the auto dialers and this, it's like, okay, well, too many calls, right? So what is left that is in no way shape or form, for better, for worse, scalable, Right? Scalable enough to create that level of noise is finding ways to get in person. So we are again going back to what I mentioned at the top, seeing a big focus, big investments on different ideas around how do we just make sure that we're getting where our buyers are, that we're breaking through the noise by breaking through the screen, so to speak.
- [23:40]
C
Hey everyone, super quick break from the show and before we jump back in, I have a really quick note for marketing and Revops leaders listening to this episode. If you have felt uneasy defending marketing's impact and tying activities to outcome because your metrics don't quite hold up, especially around the dreaded pipeline source. We're hosting a live workshop next week on February 11th on the KPIs that actually help you show marketing's influence on pipeline creation and revenue. So it's designed to help teams get super clear before going into Q2 and locking in those decisions. So depending on when you're listening to the show, you'll find the registration link in the show notes. And after the workshop, we're also going to be opening up our April Cohort for our 14 day revenue visibility diagnostic. All right, back to the show.
- [24:34]
A
Have you run or attended any events recently or anything in person? And what do you think worked really well for teams that are planning events this year?
- [24:44]
B
So I'm going to be singing from our own hymn book here because Sales assembly for the past four or five years, you know, in person events have been really big for us. I mean, we travel around the country 13 to 15 times a year, putting on small invite only dinners in different cities across the U.S. you know, Denver, New York, Boston, San Francisco, et cetera. We will bring together a collection of 25 to 30 vps of sales CROs. Some of them are Sales assembly clients. A lot of them are not. But again, what has worked for us is not only getting there in person and getting there in person under the confines of no content, no pitch, we're just here to build a relationship. Right? And presumably if I'm inviting you, Amber, to a dinner that we're doing in New York, you're going to take some time. Like, okay, who are these Sales assembly folks that are inviting me to this dinner? Right. You already know what we do, right? You know, walking in there and sure, you know, Maybe I'll take two minutes after we have 30 executives seated, just introduce myself. Like, hey, by the way, Sales assembly does skills training. But where the real magic, and when I say magic, I mean the quantifiable ROI for us has happened is just having that mixture of in the room, you have half of the audience, the Sales assembly clients. Half are not. They're all sitting next to each other and talking. Right. Organically, Sales assembly is going to come up. Like, how do you know these Sales assembly folks? Oh my God, we've been using them for seven years and they're amazing. And that they've really helped my team. Perfect. That has helped us drive a whole lot of pipeline. Right. And done so in a way that does not require us using clay or again, any of these outsourced functions where we're just bombarding People with either emails or calls. And we do see again, a lot of other organizations finding success with those type of just really thoughtful, intimate and simultaneously low pressure, just micro events. Let's just get, you know, a small handful of clients and non clients together in a room. Let's give them the opportunity to talk about their challenges and things that they're working on and they're struggling with. And let's just sit back and, you know, watch sort of the magic come from that.
- [27:01]
A
Wow, that sounds amazing. Yes. Let me know when you come back to Atlanta. And yeah, that really resonates because like you said, it's just a volume issue. And even if you are super surgical with AI, like my friend Jordan Crawford, he's all about leveraging AI to what does he call it? A permissionless value prop. So it's a one to one value proposition that is valuable, stands on its own legs. So it's not a, hey, do you want to know more about this? Or hey, you know, you're having this problem. So here's this. It's like, no, this is just value. And that's, that is the bar to actually add value, you know, at this point is so much higher than I think people realize. Right. Like you think you're adding value, you need to 10x that and then you're actually giving something. Right. And so what you're describing, Matt, is this really invaluable, intangible thing that you're doing with in person. It's a win, win situation and you're certainly adding tons of value for the folks, you know, in these cities that you're traveling to by association and meeting people and just getting out of the house, like away from your kids for a few hours and like having an amazing dinner. Who doesn't want that? So that's really cool. We also hear that, well, you know, how do you prove the ROI to your CEO and your cfo? Like, are you measuring? Okay, we're inviting these people who are in pipeline right now and we want to see is that going to accelerate the deal versus the ones who didn't go. So like, is it a feeling that you know it's working and like you can see it's working. But what does ROI mean?
- [28:41]
B
You know, that's a really fair question. We do actually measure that, at least here at Sales Assembly. You know, we have a simple checkbox in the HubSpot associated with any deal. Did they come to a dinner? Right. And again, going back to the conversation earlier about attribution, right. You know, really what we're looking at is just that correlation rather. Oh, no, no, no. The dinner closed the deal, right? Well, no, I mean, you know, maybe we're talking, you know, maybe they're already late in the sales cycle and they just happen to come to a dinner two weeks before they sign the sales assembly membership agreement. We focus less on that and again, more on just the general correlation. The more people that we can get to our dinners, the higher likelihood that we're going to have of building a strong relationship with them and therefore converting it into a closed one deal. And that I think is as simple. It's really simple to execute. Again. Yes. No binary. Did they come to a dinner, but just leaving it at that. Right. And again, not really getting too concerned about like, oh, okay, well, did the dinner close deal doesn't matter.
- [29:45]
A
Of the revenue gets attributed to the dinner.
- [29:48]
B
Yeah, yeah, like that, you know, far away. Yeah. To be fair, we're admittedly a small company. Right. So, you know, we're not managing a whole lot of different egos and, you know, responsibilities internally. But we do think that some version of this would be the easiest, lowest stress, but at the same time relatively impactful way to track whether or not a marketing, a field marketing initiative like this is actually going to be bearing fruit.
- [30:19]
A
Yeah, makes sense. I love that. And this is why I'm so glad that you were able to come on and join us today, Matt. So following on that trend of back to basics, you know, if it's working, like you can see it's happening, you don't need a spreadsheet with all this gymnastics to like assign the credit. You can just see it because you're paying attention. So let's talk about forecasting. This is something that we have been working on a lot at Pesetto to help specifically on the marketing side, forecasting and like, what's really going to lead to, based on correlation, these outcomes that you want to see in revenue. And I feel like forecasting, why is it still so hard? I mean, I, in my revenue operations career have come across so many different methodologies. You have tops down, you have bottoms up, you have AI forecasting. But like, all of it really comes down to is the data that you're collecting the right data, are you asking the right questions at the right time and is it consistent? And that's when you know your technology can help you and these models can help you forecast. But how is it so complicated? You have this great Post, Matt, on LinkedIn about how sales leaders in 1910 forecasted better than we do today. Yeah.
- [31:42]
B
And, you know, admittedly, and in that post, you know, I referenced Todd Capone, who is my Yoda, on all of this kind of stuff, you know, especially forecasting. And, you know, Todd just put it in, as Todd does, the most eloquent but simplistic way imaginable. The reason why forecasting is still so tough, because we're too focused on seller behaviors as opposed to buyer behaviors. Right. You know, and just think about, you know, every forecasting framework, you know, did you send a proposal? Like, yes, checkbox perfect. Who gives a shit? Who'd you send the proposal to? Did they open it? Did they send it around? Have they looped someone in from their team? You know, so again, less focus on what we're doing as sales professionals trying to adhere buyers into a very rigid process or methodology that we have. And again, where we're just going in and checking a box. Yep, I took this activity. And therefore, where the deal is healthy. No, I mean, let's look at the buyer's activities, the buyer's actions, what they're doing throughout the process, and then based our forecasting off of that. Rather than just again, stages that we may artificially put into Salesforce and check a box saying, like, yep, I did this. So, you know, deal has 70% likelihood to close. Right. That's not the way that buyers work.
- [33:00]
A
So how do you recommend to get real tactical? Because I always recommend that sales deal stages are not internal stages, but they're external, you know, as you mentioned. Yeah, but in terms of. Well, is that the best way to do this? Like, what are the stages? Is this where like a deal room comes in because you're actually tracking what the customer is doing? Like, can you give us a couple of tactics for how to accomplish that customer centric buying cycle?
- [33:32]
B
Yeah. And yes, I do think that a platform like a deal room could be a good value add here because, you know, it gives you a layer of visibility that you might not have again, just by sending a proposal. Right. Because within a deal room, you could see who's viewing what, how they're engaging with it. And going back to what you mentioned before, I do know that there are a lot of really amazing AI tools that are making great strides in helping teams forecast. I think the reason that some of these AI tools are so effective is because you do see them taking into strong consideration buyer behaviors. What buyers are saying on the calls, what buyers are typing in their emails, versus, again, just sellers saying, like, yes, I did this and I'm marking it in the CRM. So if we didn't want to get super tactical, you know, just a few ideas and again, broad brushstrokes, depends on the product sales cycle, et cetera, et cetera. But rather than having a stage, let's say proposal sent, having a stage that quantifies, okay, well how many other stakeholders have been looped into the decision making process. If we know through all this data that again AI is pushing to us, if we know that we're going to have the best chance to win if we're talking to at least pick a number five people within an organization, Right. Are you only talking to two right now? It's okay if so. No, we can't move that as stage four because we know again, leveraging all this data across all the deals that we need X number of stakeholders included in the conversation. Right. So again basing forecasting and I'm not saying that this is going to be easy, although again it is going to be getting easier with all the AI tools that are rolling out right now. But again, setting stages based on buyer activities, what they're saying, who they're talking to, how they're talking to you and the different individuals from their side that they're looping in to the sales process. Right. Reverse engineering what works from a buyer perspective and then having those be the separate stages that you work on through your CRM.
- [35:38]
A
Oh man, I'm going to go implement that right now. In terms of best practice that we share with customers because multi threading is always something that we know is super valuable but again in the day to day in the data, often it's wild. Like go look in your CRM, right? If you're listening to this, go look and see how many contacts are associated to opportunities on average when they're open or when they're one. Like how many contacts are even that you can even see were involved in the buying cycle. And so often we see that it's just one contact. And so you might have 100 contacts on the account and Salesforce, but you don't know which ones were involved in the buying cycle or which ones attended the meetings and didn't like. You need a system to be able to associate those. Of course a lot of this can be automated depending on your tech stack. You know you mentioned Gong, Salesforce has Einstein, et cetera. But that is a table stakes thing that you want to know who is in the buying committee across mid market versus enterprise and do we win when we have like you said, more stakeholders? Which stakeholders? That's an excellent exercise. To go run. And if you're not tracking it, definitely go do that because that's what also it just unlocks so much other capability as well. Something that, you know, we always recommend that at the SETO because it's a marketing influence, table stakes as well, because we want to be able to see what are those stakeholders doing across the life cycles and how is marketing contributing or where, where are the opportunities for them? And that comes a lot in pipeline acceleration as well, which marketing often doesn't even know how they're helping with pipeline acceleration or maybe they're not really doing anything at all and they just can't tell. So you need to be able to see that data.
- [37:31]
B
Yeah. And I mean, going a step further, that there is a responsibility on leadership, especially frontline leadership that are running these forecasting meetings to start inspecting different things. Right. So for example, if you know, rep is saying like, you know, 90%, you know, likelihood of close, if they can't answer questions like, okay, what is the compelling event if Amber's my champion, if I cannot authentically and eloquently answer the question, why is Amber doing this? Why is Amber a champion? You know, she likes the product. Well, no, I mean, is she up for a promotion if this works? Right. You know, what is legitimately in it for her as an individual, as a professional? These are some of the questions that a lot of leaders don't really drill down into. They just trust the salesforce stages without actually going a step further and inspecting. Like, okay, well, tell me why, Tell me why this should be at 90% or 75%. And it can't just be because you sent a proposal. You have to be able to let me know, like, okay, if there are three stakeholders, three decision makers involved in this, what are the motivations for each of these three individuals? You need to have that documented or else, no, we're not moving this to stage three. Right. Or the stage four, you know, whatever the case may be. So I don't want it to be lost that there is a frontline leadership responsibility to start again driving these types of behaviors. And by that I mean making sure that reps are being more diligent about finding the answers to these critical questions if they are going to commit to a deal.
- [39:03]
A
Got it. Yeah, I love that. And it makes me think about the difference between the discipline on what matters versus all these other requirements that might just be tech debt, honestly, or CRM debt. And speaking from the revenue operations perspective, that's definitely your operators who should be going in there to Say, hey, sales leader, like what's most important across the buying cycle that we want to make sure that you're operationalizing against and just everything else, just take it out, like especially don't make it manual. I mean, we hate that. Okay, well, I know we're getting close to wrapping up here, Matt, because you have such a busy life as a famous CRO. So I want to ask you a couple of lightning round questions. Are you ready?
- [39:47]
B
Yeah. Yeah. Hit me.
- [39:48]
A
Okay. Your LinkedIn presence is insane. How do you keep up with posting as much as you do? And where does this gold mine of content come from? What's your content creation process? Why are you investing the time in this? Obviously it must take a ton of time. What are you doing?
- [40:08]
B
Yeah, well, thanks for saying that. Why are we doing this? Because candidly, LinkedIn has always been our best marketing channel and you know, we want to make sure that we are making thoughtful investments, especially from a time perspective in that, from a content perspective, I do admittedly have a bit of a cheat code. So one of the things that we do here at sales assembly is every month we host recurring standing zoom calls, a series of them. One for AES, one for BDRs, one for VPs of sales and CROs, one for rev ops leaders, et cetera, et cetera. And unlike everything else that we do, it's not training. The whole point of these monthly recurring zooms is if you're an ae, if you're a rev ops leader, if you're a CRO, you could hop on the zoom. There's always going to be between 30 to 80 of your counterparts from all the different B2B tech companies that we work with. And the sole point is give you the opportunity to just talk. Right? Here's what I'm working on. Here's what I'm struggling with. Hey, what tools are you guys using? Like, hey, we're thinking about rolling out this new comm plan. So when we have nine, ten calls like that across all these different job titles every month and I'm just sitting there listening in, right? Like, huh, that's an interesting idea. Yeah, that's going to be a great nugget for me to like, hey, you know, I heard about this framework the other day when I was sitting on one of these peer group calls. So, yeah, that if you read a good amount of the nonsense that I throw up on LinkedIn, I do tend to reference like, hey, you know, I overheard this, I overheard that very rarely. These are my ideas. These are ideas that I'm Hearing other people putting into practice, hearing how they work. And I'm saying that's interesting. I'm going to see if I can share that with a broader audience.
- [41:51]
A
Wow, that's really cool. So yeah, if you're listening to this, think about how you can implement. Regardless of what your business is, there is an opportunity for social listening, which is really what you're describing here. And flip that value add and turn it into something that can help you sell.
- [42:07]
B
Like Matt, I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy, but there probably are easier ways to do it. But I do appreciate this sentence.
- [42:15]
A
It's so good. I just log out of LinkedIn after I see your post. I'm like, I'm good. Like, I can come back in five days.
- [42:21]
B
I scared you away. You know, I was like, this is useless.
- [42:24]
A
Okay, so quick question for all the marketing leaders. What is one thing that you think a CMO could change to improve alignment with sales?
- [42:35]
B
Oh, wow, what a great question. It goes, and I hate to sound like a broken record, but I do think that it will go back to one of the nuggets that we touched on during the top of this conversation is to the extent that you're comfortable with it. And again, I can only imagine how tough it is going into board meetings where board members, many of which may not have been operators, that they're living in spreadsheets. So they're looking at attribution, seeing how hard you can steer the conversation away from again, the MQLs and this and that. Like, no, let's get alignment on revenue as long as deals are closing and every quarter we're closing more deals than last quarter. And again we see this correlation. That's how we're going to have alignment with sales, which like I said before, much easier said than done, I would presume. I'm not a marketer, never been a marketer, never been a marketer in a board meeting. Right. So again, I understand or I could only imagine how unfair some of those conversations might be and why there is always this reversion to the mean towards attribution just so that the leader could say like, well, no, I mean we're productive over here and this stuff is working. See, to the extent that you can of just having the sole purpose being revenue across the board.
- [43:52]
A
Wow, that's amazing. And it sounds like what you're saying is that somebody's got to reach over the line here. Right? Like you're reaching over to clasp hands.
- [44:02]
B
Yeah. And you certainly, I was going to say in sales leaders we have to have ownership of this too. I mean, we have to be comfortable sharing credit. We can't say, oh yeah, yeah, marketing's good, but no, I mean, it's my producers. I mean, they're really closing, you know, everything and you know, we're picking up the slack over here. Sales leaders do have to become more comfortable around giving up, setting their ego aside and just saying, like, look, I mean, if the business is going well, we're hitting our metrics and we're growing at the rate that we should, what does it matter, you know, what team gets credit versus not?
- [44:35]
A
Yeah, that sounds like a power pack combo there. If you've got your sales leader reaching over the line saying, hey marketing, I'm open, like, I'm here to support you. And then you've got your marketing leader reaching over the line saying, hey sales, we're open and we're here to support you and we're one team. Can't really argue with that. I mean, something is going to shift, right? Even if you keep your, you know, attribution models the same, you keep your comp models the same, that is a major shift and you will see the benefits in your business. So thank you for that, Matt. Thanks for that nugget. Well, it's been great. Let us know listeners, what other questions that you have for Matt and maybe we can have him back on again soon. I would certainly love that. We've gotten a ton of great insight from you. If you're not following Matt Green on LinkedIn, go do it. Check out Sales Assembly. See if Sales assembly has an event coming up in your city. But what else should we be looking at for Sales assembly coming up this year and what are you working on?
- [45:40]
B
At the risk of sounding boring, you know, unlike literally every company that we work with, you know, These high growth B2B tech, we're not about like, hey, here's this big new product release or this pivot or this that, the other thing. It's like, no, it's again, at the risk of sounding boring, we're continuously ongoing week over week trying to make improvements in our product, Our product being our training, improvements in the customer experience, improvements on the CS side of the house. So it's just every week, just small incremental improvements that when you look back over the course of the year, it's like, wow, we got a lot accomplished and the business is thriving because of that.
- [46:17]
A
Wow, that's amazing. So happy for you guys and excited to see Sales assembly thrive for another hundred years. So thanks so much for being here, Matt. And we will talk to you soon.
- [46:28]
B
Yeah, thanks for having me, Amber. This was awesome.
- [46:31]
A
Thanks, guys.
- [46:41]
B
Sam.