Reps Who Skip the Story Lose the Deal with Rob Potter

0:00I always tell people all the time, learn a story about your customers. And if you don't have one, go learn somebody else's. Because it's the story of how someone uses a product. It's a story of how an outcome came about from that product. It's the story of what was the journey someone went through to understand what the problem was they were solving, how they were going to solve it, how they implemented our capabilities, what that outcome was, and how that actually elevated their visibility with their leadership in the company. That's the passion. Welcome to the Revenue Builders Podcast, a weekly show featuring B2B sales leaders and executives.

0:40Hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and force management co-founder John Kaplan, the show takes guests in the barrel, behind the scenes with the people who've been there, done that, and seen the results. Revenue Builders covers best practices for scaling and growing your business while sharing the pitfalls to avoid.

1:02John Kaplan: Welcome back to another episode of the Revenue Builders Podcast. I'm John Kaplan, here as always with my co-host, John McMahon. Today's guest is someone I go back with a while. I met Robert Potter years ago at RSA, back when he was building sales organizations inside some of the most consequential companies in enterprise security, like IBM, RSA, and EMC, Symantec, LandCope, Mandiant, and the list goes on. He's worked alongside leaders like Art Coviella, Joe Tucci, and Tom Heiser, along with a frequent guest on the Revenue Builders, Mark Thurman. What makes Robert different is the vantage point.

1:50John Kaplan: He sold as an individual contributor, led as a sales executive, sat on the buying side as a CISO customer, bet on companies as a venture investor, and now he's in the CEO chair at UMNITSA, running the platform play at the intersection of IT asset management and AI. We talk about what great selling has actually looked like across 30 years of watching it up close. What changes and what doesn't when you go from revenue leader to CEO and where he thinks AI is taking IT management or IT asset management and enterprise sales. This is Robert Potter, CEO of UMNITSA. So Rob, great to see you after all these years.

2:42John Kaplan: I have some fond memories of you at RSA and it's really, really good to see you again, buddy. Yeah, you as well. We had some good times there. And I can certainly tell you that your program, Force Management, really impacted me personally. I've carried it with me for years. So I'm really honored to be on your show and I guess achieve the level of approval from your tutelage. village i'm so glad to hear that buddy because as i remember for the three or four days we were together you were busting my chops for eight hours a day bro you gotta you gotta challenge it to make sure it's worth but it was worthy he didn't want to be there in the beginning cap he didn't want no not very much he do not i felt like it was a punishment from thurman but it turned out to be an awesome experience hey buddy you have such a cool career i mean like i did by the way i didn't even know this like I didn't know you started off as a coder I remember so let's get started a little bit with the origin story like you're a you're a hockey captain at Quinnipiac and you know you become a you become a coder and then you know and you know obviously we're going to talk about how you wind up in a CEO position but let's just talk a little bit about you know just the origin so we can get our our our yeah well you know the funny thing is I went to school to be a veterinarian.

4:14And after one probably semester of that, I was like, yeah, this is not what I want to do. And I had a great mentor and guidance counselor since passed away, Bruce Ollier at Quinnipiac. And, you know, he really did a great job of really helping me understand what I enjoyed and what I was good at. And it was like, really the first time I had exposure to the idea of having a mentor, someone in your life that actually gives you some perspective outside of your own visibility. And he was right. I really enjoyed math. I really enjoyed computers. You know, I've not mastered the English language very well.

4:55So it was a limiting set of areas. And as much as I enjoyed my career at Quinnipiac, the NHL was probably not my prospect. So I had a great opportunity along the way. Again, you know, the whole mentoring theme. I met a guy, Mark Morin, who was a significant executive at IBM. And, you know, through that relationship, had an opportunity to go work for IBM as an engineer and a fantastic company to start your career off. And they just the way that they educate you, the way that they invest in you as an individual is just can't say enough about that corporation. I think even today, fantastic organization for anyone to begin their career in.

5:41And, you know, I was there for a number of years. I worked on operating system development, and I had a unique opportunity at one point in my career to be pulled into a customer engagement with, back then, the Blue Cross Blue Shield company. And I just couldn't, John, I couldn't get enough of being around a customer and seeing how a customer was using the technology that I was helping write. and it really sparked an energy in me that I was like this is what I got to do I got to get out of this closet in programming you know and literally it was a closet I mean they gave you an office with no windows and you went in in the morning and you stayed there all night and you know the the cool thing about IBM is I think they understood um the humanistic side right they they wanted you to get out every once in a while and go do something but they created an environment that allowed you to really excel.

6:42And when I got out and I experienced this customer thing, I immediately was like, I got to go do this. And I got into a role as a technical consultant at IBM, which nowadays is the SE role. And then from there, I spent a few years doing that. And then, you know, like, like most SEs, right, you kind of take a look at the salesperson who's making all this money, and you feel like you're doing all the work. And, and I always joke with my essays and I say this, I thought that asking for money was the easy part. And I had, you know, again, a couple of really strong mentors that gave me an opportunity to get into sales.

7:20And I will tell you, when I first got into sales, it was a dismal failure. Was that at IBM? Yeah, I know. It was actually at a company called WRQ. I had a great founder there, Doug Walker. Doug was like, you got the personality, you should be out selling. And I helped start the office that they had on the East Coast. They were a West Coast based emulation company, sounded like a radio station, but later got consumed by AttachMate. And, you know, it was a really, I was really fortunate that I had people around me that saw where I was failing and jumped in to help. And that's, you know, for me, I think that that was probably the most critical point in my career where I had a couple of individuals step up and say, hey, you got to stop trying to be the smartest person in the room.

8:16And you got to make sure that the customer understands you're part of a team that can deliver. And that changed my career.

8:24John Kaplan: Yeah. Talk a little bit more about that because you're not the first person to have an incredible sales career that started off on the technical side. And then you just made that comment about being careful not to be the smartest person in the room. Talk about the advantages of being on the higher end of the smarter category in the room. Yeah, well, I think there'll be some people that argue with that, but yeah. And the disadvantages a little bit and how that shows up in a sales call. I think, you know, I'll use other people's words. A lot of the CISOs that I've worked with over the years, because I've been in cybersecurity for a long time, the role I'm in now is outside of that wheelhouse.

9:07But I think your technical skills, when you come out of being an engineer into the sales environment, your technical skills give you some credibility. People know that you're not pitching from a marketing deck. You're not pitching from a value proposition. You're pitching from a knowledge and an experience. Some of the best CISOs that I've had the opportunity to work with, as much as we joke around, they've commented that your technical knowledge is your credibility. I think, though, when you become the sole source of all of the answers to a customer, my experience has been that it creates a gap.

9:46It doesn't expose your company's strength in the depth. It doesn't expose your company's strength in terms of where are the additional resources that are going to support successful implementations. And I think fundamentally, it really exposes you as an individual that doesn't know how to work on a team. And at the end of the day, I don't care which company I've ever worked for. Our most successful customers, they have had tremendous success with us because we put a team forward to make them successful. And I think when you look across, you know, the great companies that are out there, they understand this concept, right?

10:31There's not just an account person. There's a technical account manager. There's an SE. There's a consulting organization. There's customer success. There's tech support. There's a group of people that are working together to really put their best foot forward and really deliver the ROI that they promised during that sales pitch. And I think for me, that was probably the most important learning aspect of my career and development, because it's helped me understand as I've gone into leadership roles, What are the fundamental components of the business that I have to make sure are working properly?

11:06And how do you make sure that those lines of communications are happening so that everybody's aware of what the customer is doing? And frankly, I will tell you that my experience in most cases, when you have an issue in customer success or you have an issue with a customer, it's a breakdown in communication, not a breakdown in technology.

11:23John Kaplan: I think you're hitting on something that's so critical for me in today's day and age, especially in enterprise sales is the most successful sellers that I see are the ones that can kind of have a foot in each camp and a foot in the technical camp and a foot in the business outcome camp. And I think the most elite sellers that I've seen are the ones that know how to translate those technical requirements into business outcomes. When I see really, really great SEs, I encourage them to think about the completion of the movement into a, you know, into a business outcome. When I see really, really good sellers, I encourage them to, you know, make sure that they're working on highly differentiated capabilities.

12:13John Kaplan: So where those world, where those two worlds come together is just, is, you know, where I find really, really elite sellers. How about, how about yourself? Yeah, I agree a hundred percent. And I think, you know, it's funny, you taught me the phrase command of the message and command of your business. And I think, you know, an evolution of that is really understanding the maturation of a transaction or the command of the motion, right? It's really, you've got to understand how are you going to navigate those phases. I mean, if I think of the things that I came away from your trainings on, I think one of the most powerful things that I learned from you was the concept of a reverse timeline, really understanding where do you want to be and then what's the path that's going to get you there.

13:05I've continued to use that, John, not just in transactions, but in my career. And, you know, I think it's an amazing concept if you really think about it is how do you think, where do you want to be? How are you going to get there? But I think the other part that's really important is who's going to help you get there. You know, as much as in sales you hear, don't win or lose alone, the win or the loss comes from not planning. And if you can really sit down and plan what that path looks like, I think that's where you really leverage the team. And you really begin to show the customer that you've got a depth and a scale that can really help them as a company, regardless of how big your ARR is, your revenues are as a company.

13:53So Bob, sometimes you mentioned sales team, right? I want to understand for the audience, like how that manifests itself as you moved from this technical salesperson to sales team. Are you advocating that you're bringing in more of those team members into each and every sales call? Talk a little bit about how that manifests itself. Yeah, that's a great point. Look, I think where the balance is between what I would say are the great sales leaders and the average ones are the understanding of how to delegate and when to delegate. And, you know, that's something that I always joke about this. I remember the phone call that I had with with, you know, you know, Brian Nail and John, you know, I remember Brian Nail and calling me up one day and he's like, hey, you're doing a great job.

14:47Bobby goes, but if you don't learn to delegate, you are not going to make it. And it's like, you cannot do all of this stuff in scale. And to me, that was, you know, another one of those eye-opening lessons as you're evolving as a leader. And he did a great job of really articulating the importance of that. And I think that's where, you know, I learned that there are different stages during the sales cycle where you've got to engage those other people. And if you don't do that properly, first off, it becomes a very high cost sales effort. If I'm bringing everybody in day one and have them engaged all the way through, the ROI on that just doesn't work for any company.

15:31But I think that's really the most important piece is knowing when to delegate and at what phase in the sales cycle are you delegating to those different people. Right. I mean, in the basic format of a sales cycle, I'm, you know, introducing a customer to our company. I'm trying to establish that value prop. I'm going to prove that our technology actually aligns to that. It's, you know, it's the common things through the conversation guide. How do I help the customer understand the before scenario? You know, what are the pains that are tied to that before scenario? What can good look like? You know, what are the metrics that we've got to identify to make that good look good?

16:10And then how do we prove that we've done it and give some demonstration of that and then move into us starting a relationship where we're constantly proving the ROI that we just said we could deliver?

16:23John Kaplan: You are officially certified in force management command of the message. Well done. Well done, Robert. Many years. Many years. The other thing, though, is we had the way you just described it, it reminds me of we had Mike Hazan, who was the commander of SEAL Team 2 for probably a decade. And he talked about subordinate leadership. You're like, well, what does that mean? He goes, as the leader or commander of CL Team 2, I got to understand my strengths and weaknesses, my skill set, my knowledge. I have to understand that for everybody else on my team. And there's certain moments during a mission where I subordinate my leadership to someone else on the team.

17:03And they might be in charge for 30 seconds. They might be in charge for 30 minutes. But when that certain I need that certain skill set or knowledge, that's who I subordinate my leadership to. And then I pull it back and give it to somebody else. But I have to know along the mission where I'm really strong, where my team's really strong. Yeah, I think, you know, that's a great way to articulate it. But I think the the great leaders that I've had the opportunity to work for, the one commonality I've seen in them is they have the courage to recognize that there might be people that they've brought on their team purposefully.

17:36that know that one area better than them. And they will ask, you know, what are your thoughts here? What's your opinion here? And I think that's the moment that you recognize that a leader has, you know, the confidence and the self-awareness and to recognize that they've got to leverage their entire team. And that's, to me, those are the best leaders I've worked for. So let's talk about that. You worked for some great leaders like Art Coviello, Mark Thurman at RSA. You worked for Joe Tucci, known as one of the best leaders as CEO of EMC. You worked with Tom Heiser, who was RSA president. Did any of those leaders have something in common or do you look at each of them where they had a different great leadership strength?

18:23And can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. So, you know, tremendous respect for Art Coviello. He's a actually good friend. And we're both at Sim Ventures together. He pulled me in there. You know, owe a lot of the success of my career to the mentoring he's provided. But that being said, while he and Brian Nalen and Jim Bandanza really gave me my opportunity to get into leadership at RSA. And it was the first time I had the opportunity to really run some significant revenue. I would say Mark Thurman's the person that really taught me how to run a business, really understand, you know, what are the metrics, really understand the importance of those metrics.

19:04But while at the same time, not to lose visibility of the fact that you fundamentally still are selling and you fundamentally are still understanding the value of your product. But if you don't truly understand what are the metrics, how do you read them? Where are the indicators of health? Where are the indicators of pause? where do you have to really think about the business from a perspective of what are going to be the key metrics? And with him, I'll be very candid. The one thing I learned was of all of your metrics, growth. If you can't understand the percentage of growth quarter over quarter and year over year, it doesn't matter how much revenue you're delivering.

19:47If you're growing the business, you're doing things right. And accelerating that growth is probably the most important thing. So there's a lot of metrics that are important in the business. But, you know, the ones that Thurman, you know, taught me are critical. And I think to your question, they all had that commonality. They all knew how to run the business. They all knew the key metrics in each aspect of the business that they had to be looking at. I think, you know, Art, I didn't have a lot of experience with Joe Tucci, but a few times. And I would say that every one of them knew exactly the four to five questions to ask you when they first met you as a leader and could measure, you know, pretty much how you were doing in that part of the business based on your answers.

20:33And that's something that has tremendously helped me throughout my career as a as a CRO, a COO, and now a CEO was really every once in a while I go back to kind of that dashboard that I built from listening to Thurman and just looking at how do I make sure that I'm looking at the right things and understanding the right things to run the business properly. What about the business? What did you learn from the leaders on the people side of the business? look I always look at metrics but we're dealing with people right to grow yeah listen culture people grow people yeah yeah culture's critical I I think uh the number one thing that I learned from the leaders that I've had exposure to is that look honesty is the most important thing and uh you know I've I've uh been very fortunate to work for leaders that had high integrity and we're very direct, transparent and honest people.

21:30And now granted in the business world, there's aspects that you can't give 100 % of the picture, but I've never seen any of them mislead knowing what they've got there. And I think when you think about culture, the most important thing is people have to trust you as a leader. They've got to believe that what you're telling them is the truth. And I think the other part of that is while you've got to make sure that the business is number one, right? Well, customers are number one, the businesses is number two, and your employees are number three, right? Because the employees support the business that supports the customer.

22:12I think you've got to understand the difference between making business decisions for the business and empathy, having empathy for your employees, right? And there's a fine line there. I think, you know, organizations that look at people as statistics and as a name on a list in a company, and I've seen it. I've seen organizations where, you know, when we get in times of layoffs or we get in times of contraction in terms of investment, there's a lack of empathy to understand that these are the people that the company's foundation are built upon. And I think if you combine the ability to understand how you leverage empathy in your leadership model and you leverage that and combine it with transparency and honesty, I think those are the two core characteristics I see in the great leaders that I've worked for.

23:07John Kaplan: I see a common theme in the people that Johnny listed there from a leadership perspective. I feel like one of the things that they do so well and great leaders do so well is they're honest, authentic, and realistic about the journey that it's going to take to get somewhere. So I think the best leaders I've ever seen are the ones that tell you where you're going. And then they make the journey exciting enough or worthwhile enough, but they definitely talk about something in the future and then paint a picture of what that journey is going to be like. And I find that that's the difference between really, you know, good leadership and bad leadership.

23:59John Kaplan: Because when people can't see themselves in the future or they see the future and it's like no big deal or it's too much effort for the reward. Give me your thoughts on that. How do you, as a leader, you know, constantly people, you know, they call it, some people call it keeping an eye on the prize. With your athletic background, you probably, that probably means something to you. You know, John, one of the things that when I was playing hockey, I had coaches that came up with some really cool concepts. And one concept was this idea that we played. We played a series of Stanley Cups. I think I told you this when we were in class at one time.

24:41So our coach never measured more than beyond seven games. And if we could win the cup in every seven games, we were going to have a pretty successful season. And, you know, I think in the business world, you've got to be careful that if you put the reverse timeline too far out, you can't build to it because there's too many things that happen dynamically that you control and don't control, you know, in the business world. So I think, you know, the answer to your question is that the first thing you have to do is you've got to set milestones that are ambitious, but you can clearly help people understand how exactly they're going to get there.

25:24And I think one of the places, you know, you talk about revenue building. One of the areas that early on in my career, I think I did a pretty, pretty good job of was I would sit reps down and I would make sure they believed they could hit the number we were giving them for a quota. and I would build it out. I'd say, you're going to need this many transactions at this band, right? You need this many at 150. You need this many at 500. You need this many at a million and then start to build out like, where are they going to come from? Who are the accounts in your territory that can fall in this band?

25:57Who are the accounts that are? And as soon as you started to map that out for them, they started to buy into, yeah, I can go get those. Yeah, I've already talked with them and they start to build that belief in that momentum. That's no different when you're managing the entire company. Like you've got to have an ability to let marketing see where they can achieve their success, engineering, see where they can achieve their success, tech support, customer success, consulting, the finance organization, legal. And I think as each one of them has that opportunity to start to see where that is, it's your job as a leader to then show them where those dots connect and how engineering success and product success is going to be tied into marketing success to generate leads and sales success to convert those, right?

26:47And I think that's the part where, you know, I've had the opportunity to work for some people that really demonstrated what that path looks like and what those connections look like.

26:57John Kaplan: I love the point that you're making because, you know, a lot of leaders will tell me, though, man, you know, I just, I can't, I can't get people passionate enough. I, you know, there's, there's a lack of passion. And I've always found for me that passion only comes from belief and belief only comes from evidence. And so like what you just kind of, you know, it's like, Hey, I want to get you to climb Mount Everest, but if I don't teach you how to get to base camp one or base camp too, your lungs are going to explode. You're going to die on the way up. And so I like the way that you articulated that is that, you know, you can talk about a grand vision, but, you know, if you can't help people, you know, visualize how you're going to get up that mountain and what are the, you know, how we're going to measure the base camps or what have you.

27:49John Kaplan: And then, you know, your job as a leader is to help people believe. I've heard people say, well, that person doesn't believe. So, you know, I think, well, it's your job as a leader to help them believe. Yeah, totally agree with that. And I think Art Coviello used to tell me all the time, your best asset is your passion. Sometimes it might be my worst asset. I don't know. But but it's it's you know, I think if you're someone who believes in the company, when I look back at you know, you mentioned Joe Tucci, Art Coviello, Mike Brown, you know, some of the great CEOs that I've worked for, Ed Potts, I mean, you know, Mike Potts, you know, there's so many people that when I look back at them, the way they could get up and talk about the company, the direction of the company and the value the company brings to the customers, it was genuine.

28:39It was a genuine passion. And, you know, to me, that's contagious in an organization. If you can see it in the leader, it's easy to have that spread down through the organization. And I think, you know, You know this better than anyone. There's nothing like a person who is representing your company that is passionate and believes in the value they bring to the customer they're selling to. That's the most powerful revenue builder there is out there. What you guys are talking about really is the difference between what I always think is transactional leadership and transformative leadership. Yeah, yeah.

29:16So I've been part of a company where it was transactional leadership. Like, you're going to make the number or we're going to put a bullet in you. And they didn't do anything to develop you. Zero. Yeah. Just all threats. Yeah. Yeah. Or you could be part of transformative leadership where they are trying to develop you. You are learning. You are growing. And because of that, you're starting to win. And when you're starting to win, you develop pride. And now you're proud to be part of the company, proud of the people you work for, proud of the leaders, proud of the company. And that's a culture that people want to be part of.

29:58Yeah. They don't want to be part of. You're just a freaking hired gun. And if you don't make it, that's too bad because you're not growing. You're not developing. And no one wants to be part of that. And they will stay part of it until something happens at the company level where they miss the number. And then all of a sudden, here come all those people just running off that ship quick. And you see it every day today, every day. And you can tell the type of culture that they had at that company because other companies can miss the number. But almost no one wants to leave the company. Why? Because they're being transformed.

30:35they have a manager that's developing them, helping them win. They're developing pride. And they're not going to leave that because you missed the quarter, one quarter. I think you're definitely nailing it. And I'll tell you that my advice has always been to people that, you know, I remember I was sitting with a rep. She was really struggling when I was at Sinantec. We were sitting down. I remember exactly we were in Cranston, Rhode Island, and we were sitting in front of a Dunkin' Donuts and she was really upset because she was just having a really poor couple of quarters. And we just got out of a couple of sales calls.

31:13And John, I would say this is a place where you definitely had an impact on my coaching. She came out, she said, what am I doing wrong? And I said, well, I said, I don't know what you're doing wrong. I said, but here's what I will tell you. You keep telling a story that's about product. I said, and there's no passion in it. You're telling us, you're saying exactly what marketing wants you to say and you're telling the product and you're describing the value and you're describing all that. But you've got to turn that into a story, a journey that a customer can tie themselves to, right? I think, John, the way you used to say it is, I'm going to help you save yourself, right?

31:58And so what I have always found is that I always tell people all the time, learn a story about your customers. And if you don't have one, go learn somebody else's because it's the story of how someone uses a product. It's a story of how an outcome came about from that product. It's the story of what was the journey someone went through to understand what the problem was they were solving, how they were going to solve it, how they implemented our capabilities, what that outcome was, and how that actually elevated their visibility with their leadership in the company. That's the passion, right? Me telling you my product's the best widget and it does this better than anybody and it does that and it does this and it does that.

32:45I'm in the magic quadrant and I'm this and I'm that. There's no passion there. There's no feeling there. There's no connection there of like what can my outcome be, right? I think the most important thing about a conversation guide is you're taking a person from the journey of here's where you are and here's how someone else got away from there. And you can do it too, right?

33:08John Kaplan: I love what you're saying. I think that the best sellers I've ever seen have a unique ability to make people stand in their own moment of pain and not make them feel like it's an indictment. It's like a collaborative, hey, we're in the suck. I understand the suck. We're in the suck. and they get them emotionally connected to getting out. Yeah. And, you know, you can't say it enough. And you can interview for this. Like if people do not have the ability to get people to emotionally connect to something, and the only way to do that is for them to realize that they have their own problem and then you get them emotionally connected to changing it.

33:57John Kaplan: I know I said a lot of words there, but when you think about that human behavior, you first have to be empathetic to allow somebody to tell their own story. You then have to help them frame how bad that story sucks without making them feel like crap about it. And then you take them to a place they couldn't get to on their own. And you do it with evidence and passion because you've done it before and you have other stories. You just don't talk about, well, like IBM did this or, you know, Coke did that or it doesn't matter what the brand names are. But, you know, I love what you just said because it's always about a story.

34:39John Kaplan: First, they tell their own story. You let them tell their own story. Then you help them reframe their story. Then you tell them a joint story between you and them and how it could be something like another story. Yeah. You know, another, you know, at another company instead of just a logo. But I love what you just said on storytelling. It's come up a lot in revenue builders. Yeah. And I think the key part is what you said earlier, which your program certainly communicates people is you got to have the evidence. You got to be able to demonstrate the facts, right? And let me tell you, that sometimes can be the toughest part because so many companies now don't want you to have the ability to use their logo or talk to their brand.

35:21So the way that you navigate evidence is always a difficult one, but it's so critical. It's so important.

35:30John Kaplan: I get a little kick out of that where people tell me, if you just say, hey, you need to have a reference, and they'll go, yeah, well, they won't allow us to use their logo or mention anything. I'm like, don't make me go and research. I walked through a freaking airport, one of my favorite stories one time. I'm working at PTC and somebody's telling me this. I'm walking through an airport and right up on the wall is the same freaking account that said, told my guy that we don't allow anybody to bring some records. Yeah, we don't do that. They're on an advertisement in the airport. Yeah, you definitely do it.

36:09Yeah, it's a challenge. But I think that there's a lot of good ways of getting through that. And I think that's where you definitely have to build your story. Bob, let's talk a little bit about AI. What do you think is going on there with respect to the sales process, your salespeople, your customers? Can you talk about those three different angles? Or let's pick one of those and then we can go into the other two. But from like the rep angle or the sales process angle, the customer? Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if it's a blessing or a curse that I've had the opportunity to go through so many new technology eras, right?

36:52It's a blessing, Bob. I don't know. You went from the mainframe to the desktops, from the token ring to the connected network to distributed data to consolidated data to cloud. Like now, you know, now we've got this. We've got desktops. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Desktops. How can I forget that? The Commodore 64. Yeah, look, I was thinking a little higher than like Silicon graphics. Yeah, exactly. I think so many people are still just even learning about what the capabilities are of this AI frontier. Certainly as a CEO, you take a lot of input from investors and board members as to what's our investment there.

37:40How are we doing it? But you also, and I think now we're seeing in the marketplace, you have to have a level of responsibility to understand that there are some considerations when thinking about that investment in AI. And I think the most important thing for me has been to really be open to the fact that how we use AI and its impact and how aggressive we want to be is very different based on the component and the line of business in the company. Marketing is using it differently than sales, which is using it differently than SEs, which is using it differently than product management, which is using it differently than engineering.

38:26It's definitely a mass spec out there that every one of those roles has a different risk and a different benefit of outcome there. And I think the first thing you have to do is recognize that. I think the second thing that we've done well as a company is you have to build guidelines. You know, it's in our company. I think it's well known that the idea of using the AI platforms is great for advisement coaching. But we joked earlier, right? The prompt is where the intelligence is. How do I ask the right questions? How do I put it through? You know, I think you've seen many of the great business leaders that are out there today in the Fortune 500 companies talk about how they use AI, right?

39:17I use it. You know, there's certainly a lot of coaching that goes on in terms of your thoughts and certainly is a different set of perspectives that you can get from the different AI platforms. I do think, though, when you separate the idea of are you using AI to enable versus are you using AI to build? Those are two very different ones. I'll give you an example. We use a company called Revic. You may remember Hussein John. He was one of our leaders in the past, certainly took your classes. He's the CEO and founder at Revic. They do some really cool stuff with the way they help you leverage AI to look at your pipeline in Salesforce and really determine based on facts whether or not prospects have a high chance of moving forward with your technology or a low chance.

40:17I think in situations like that, you're accelerating the ability to look at data and make faster decisions. That's what I would say when I refer to, you know, influencing, augmenting outcome. At the same time, you know, we're looking at ways that we take AI into our engineering organization and accelerate the way we're thinking about or building components off of our platform. And you have to be very careful with how you do that. Certainly, there's a lot of sensitivities around what information goes into the learning engines and what information stays out of it. And that's a very delicate navigation in contracts right now.

41:03And it should be, by the way. But I think, look, it's certainly not going away, right? It's certainly, I think, still formulating its boundaries and what its value is. here's the one concern that I have. It reminds me a lot of the build it your own mentality, right? I'm going to build it myself mentality because what's happening is we are seeing organizations that have shifted even at UNITSA, you know, our mindset has been shifted that we have an unbelievably strong data model for managing assets. But the UI is now changing so dramatically to using Slack or using homegrown AI agents that will perform tasks.

41:55And what I think organizations will be challenged with is that when you start to build your own engineering aspects, you also have to build the way that you're going to maintain those, the way that you're going to version those, the way that you're going to iterate upon those. You have to think about, you know, that three o 'clock in the morning phone call when the system crashes and someone needs data out of that. Like those are areas of cost that I think are not necessarily being built into the concept of we can build it ourselves. And we're, it's, it's, it's kind of, kind of, to me, it's kind of interesting.

42:34We're almost going through that whole educational cycle that we through like 20 years ago when companies were like, yeah, I don't need to go buy this software platform. I can go build my own mail. I can go build my own documentation. I can go build my own procurement system. I can go. And we learned that process. And then you kind of saw the same thing in cloud. There were a lot of people that made investments that said, we'll go build our own data warehouse, our own storage area. And then all of a sudden they were like, okay, yeah, that's too costly. Let's hand this over to Google, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft.

43:08And I think now we're seeing the excitement of being able to build something somewhat taking over the responsibility of what is the long-term cost of this going to be. And I think you're already seeing some companies pull back. They're saying, yep, we can build aspects of this, but fundamentally we want to make sure that the foundation of what we're doing with AI is residing in a company, that that's their focus and that's their sweet spot. And certainly for us, the value that we are seeing right now is all of the proprietary development we've put into really building the hygiene around the data we collect across an entire asset lifecycle, and then exposing that through MCP and really allowing organizations to use the data.

44:00And I think for us, the more that we can continue to convince people that we collect and aggregate that data, normalize it, reconcile it better than anyone else, I think AI will be a thriving part of where we go. I wanted to ask you a question. With your security background, the one area that you didn't talk about when you home grow it is you have to also secure the damn thing. Listen, security, you know, I tell people when I came into this job as CEO, I was very transparent about the fact that I knew nothing about asset management. I'd go toe to toe with anybody in cybersecurity. But from an asset management perspective, the first thing I learned was that in cybersecurity, your vision of what's going on in an environment is very narrow.

44:53You are looking at all operationally active devices. Now, probably one of the most important roles in a company, right? A CISO has a tremendous responsibility and stress to protect the assets of an organization. That being said, a CIO's responsibility is just as important because when you think about the financial aspects of the business, they are responsible for how they forecast, how they acquire, who they acquire from, how they watch how those systems are in transit and the supply chain into the environment, how they manage the storage and the release and the provisioning of those devices. And then a whole aspect of the business that I did not understand is how you decommission all of these systems.

45:39How do you make sure they're wiped properly? How do you make sure that their identities are captured by security so someone's not spoofing with that information? And then the last part that I had no exposure to was this whole concept of final depreciation, the amount of money organizations lose because they can't reclaim the device and actually take it off their books. And I think when you look at those two things, John, the part to me that really stands out is that you truly, it's a great demonstration of how important it is to have a team built both with your CIO and your CISO, and that they're constantly communicating because they really do have very distinctly different responsibilities.

46:26And I think one of the things AI is doing is it's helping those organizations potentially pull that communication tighter and make it more aligned. And certainly security is going to be a critical part of that. Rob, I'd love for you to just give us a transition

46:42John Kaplan: to where you see AI in the sales arena. I think you've been pretty vocal about that. Where do you see it today? Where do you see it going? Yeah, look, you know, I joke with my team all the time. I will, you know, take things like our data and go into AI and say, hey, I'm going to do a CEO trip through New England. What are the customers I should be hitting, right? Simple things like that to more complicated things like, you know, feeding in a 10K and feeding in, you know, multiple, you know, public releases of stuff and helping and asking what's, you know, looking at our company and understanding us, how would you position, you know, our business to these companies, right?

47:38So really leveraging it to build, you know, how do I plan to go see my customers? How do I plan to go see prospects doing vertical alignments. And then I think, you know, more importantly, when you start thinking about all the information that reps have to manage today, how do you consolidate that down to really identify where the high value opportunities where we can truly add value to a customer and how to go focus on those? So I think companies like Revic, I think you're going to see, I'm sure, a lot of enhancements with Salesforce as they look to build out more and more of what they're doing.

48:21But I think you're also going to see, you know, number of technologies help in terms of tech support, in terms of customer success. How do you better, you know, understand your customer, engage with them to retain them and expand your business with them? I think all those things are going to impact the way that we think about and engage with AI from a sales perspective. Thank you, sir. We got to get you on another call in a couple of minutes. So I want to thank you a lot for your time. Well, yeah. Thank you, guys. Yeah. Listen, John, I'd be remiss if I didn't say, you know, if I could flip my my screen on, you would see my command of the message dashboards.

49:03You'd see my my every employee that's ever worked for me knows that, you know, the the conversation guide, you know, I live live by those those boxes. And, you know, you've done an amazing job of helping me have a framework that really has helped me educate many reps and really helped me design the way that I run my business. So thank you for that. I really appreciate it. Amazing, brother.

49:30John Kaplan: You look fantastic. You're killing it. Congratulations. Yeah, thanks a lot. You guys have a great day.

50:00We'll see you next time.