Transcript
A (0:10)
Welcome to the Revenue Builders podcast with John McMahon and John Kaplan. In today's segment, we feature Bob Rinaldi, former Chief Revenue officer, longtime sales leader, currently advises CROs. Through his role at FTV Capital. He shares why great revenue leaders focus less on static metrics and more on the trends behind them. He explains why looking at a single month of pipeline or bookings can be misleading and why CROs and CEOs need to study the progression of key metrics over time. If you're a CRO, a founder, or a sales leader responsible for forecasting and revenue planning, this segment highlights why data trends, not snapshots, should guide your decisions. Let's dive in.
B (1:00)
I think when we think about data, one of the. One of the things and, you know, maybe you guys have a point of view on this is that data is useful, but if you're looking at it in, like, a stagnant manner, it's like, okay, what are those metrics this month? Sort of interesting, but when you look at it based on the progression, you know, are we improving? Are we going in the wrong direction? So thinking about it over a period of time is really important. That may, like, come across as being obvious to the audience listening to this, but I do see that sometimes even pipeline. Okay, we have $6 million of pipeline to work with this quarter. Well, how much did we have last quarter? We had the quarter before. How much did we convert? Like, the, the, the devil's in the details in terms of the historical element of all those. Those really important sales metrics.
C (1:43)
Yeah, there's no doubt. And they're all interrelated. Like, sometimes you can see, like, I keep adding sales reps. My sales productivity is still holding, but for every time I had a new sales rep, I'm not adding any new logos. So the future is not looking bright. Something's going to break. It looks like it's almost ready to break. That could be a leading indicator, you know, that something's wrong. And I think what you're pointing out here is that between the CRO and the CEO, they need to use, you know, data to drive their decisions and then also align from those decisions that they make on what the future goals need to be and be realistic about it based on data.
D (2:21)
Totally.
B (2:22)
And what. Yeah, please, John.
D (2:24)
No, go ahead, Go ahead. Yeah, I just want to report.
B (2:27)
I'm on a line of thought that I want you guys to weigh in here, too. But, like, and again, I, I say this, like, with complete respect to these founders, in particular, these people that are running these businesses, but Sometimes the mistake that is made is that the, where the data is not in the forefront, decisions are being made. So here's an example. Like there could be, we want to drive outbound funnel development, therefore we're going to build an SDR function. And the SDR function might just be getting to a point where it's starting to get to a point of providing a return. But because the data is not there, the founder or CEO or the company in general might say, okay, shut down the SDR organization, tell those four people they don't have jobs anymore. And you're just at the edge of starting to see that, that return. So the point is like those leading indicators are really important in the form of data like how many calls are we making, how many discovery meetings are taking place, how many are converting to SQLs and moving through the sales process. And some companies will listen to this and they've got this stuff nailed. But I can tell you there are some companies that don't. And so the data really important. And I think that I often see situations where the, the, the measure of one success is, is based on lagging data. You know, do we hit our bookings or not or you know, things of that sort. But there's so much information, leading indicator form that gets overlooked oftentimes and it is kind of a void of data in some cases.