How To Make Your ARR 20% More Valuable To Investors | with Keenan, CEO @ A Sales Growth Company

0:00In 2012, 60 % of reps made quota. Now, 23 % of people are making quota and the spend has gone up 7x. What we're investing in isn't working. Keenan is the best-selling author of Gap Selling and the CEO of a sales growth company. For over 25 years, he's been in the trenches helping sellers win. But in today's episode, he shares common revenue team practices that can undercut an investor's trust in your entire company. So I did a paper on this, and it's called Not All Revenue is Created Equal. And if your growth is coming from a**hole, the discount could be as much as 15 % to 20 % discount on the valuation.

0:39So it's substantial. Of course, we explore how to avoid that trap, but we cover a lot more ground as well. How AI is changing sales far less than most CEOs might expect, the fundamental physics of selling that most senior sales professionals still get wrong, and why sales leaders that fixate too much on structure are often holding their whole team back. Making people do everything the same is structure. A system doesn't mean every single person has to do the same freaking thing. If you're a revenue leader carrying a number, this episode is for you. Welcome to Topline. Hey, everybody. It's Sam Jacobs.

1:10Welcome to Topline. I'm joined by my amazing co-host, Asit Zaman, the CEO of Sales Talent Agency, and AJ Bruno, the CEO of Quotapath, the leaders in incentive compensation management platform systems and databases. And if you need anything done with incentive comps, we're just trying to create a new category every time we do an episode. Every time. I'm going to be launching rockets. I'm competing against SpaceX next week. That's good. We've got a very special guest. We got Kenan on the show. I first met Kenan when I was doing the Sales Hacker podcast six years ago. He is the founder and CEO of a sales growth company, one of the most influential figures in sales of the last 20 years.

1:50Everybody knows him as the best-selling author of Gap Selling and Gap Prospecting, the books that reset modern selling around the buyer's problem instead of the seller's pitch, and the creator of the Gap Method and Problem-Centric Selling. For more than 25 years, he's helped CROs, sales leaders, and their teams stop guessing and start diagnosing. His most recent book, Gap Revenue Performance, makes a simple case. Most sales organizations don't have a training problem. They have a system problem. Outside of work, he skis more than 50 days a year, but he's a Boston fan and he's the proud father of three amazing and highly accomplished daughters, one of whom is doing great things in the work of moguls, if I am not mistaken.

2:31Kenan, welcome to Topline. Man, that was good. I got to take that and I got to put on my dating profile. That was good, bro. I'm a lot of people's hype man. I feel more special today than I have in months, years. I got to come on this show more often. Sam is really good at making us all feel great about ourselves. You should be a therapist. Now, wait till you hear from Austin. You'll go the other way. So Austin's going to take you right back down and pull you down a peg, Keenan. So don't worry about it. All right. I'm a therapist. All right, Austin, kick us off. Let's go. No small talk. Into the stuff.

3:08Keenan, we're excited to have you. There's this conversation that a calorie is a calorie. People that like getting fit, they have this debate that a calorie from a chocolate bar versus a state is the same thing. And there's some version of that that plays out in the revenue world, that revenue is revenue. A dollar of revenue that I have is the same as a dollar of revenue that Sam has and AJ has. And you've done some really interesting work that basically says that's not the case, that a dollar is not a dollar. and how it's valued by the market is very different based on certain variables. Let's start there.

3:42Tell us a little bit about what you decided to dig into and what you found. Yeah, it was an accident. So as I was researching for gap revenue performance, we identified these four archetypes for sales organizations, right? And they are the heroic, which is most common for most. We're all very familiar with it. And simply put, it's that whole idea that just get the revenue, right now they will do stuff i'm not saying people don't do stuff they don't show up and just say you know run a route there's there's stuff everywhere but at the end of the day it's just get shit you just go get the revenue right and you really see this at the end of the quarter like i'm done fighting with the market but every time i hear somebody oh i can't book anything it's the end of the month or end of the quarter i'm just like yeah it tells me all i need to know tells me all i need to know about how your organization runs and so one is heroic another one is Peacock.

4:31Another one is random. And really simply random is, okay, we have an enablement team. We have investments and tools, but there's no logic. There's no real connectivity. It's like, oh, this is bad. Quick, do this. Oh, we need this. Boom. Oh, we need this. Like imagine building a house that way, right? It's got four bedrooms. It's got a kitchen, but the kitchen is upstairs and the bathroom is somewhere else. You're like, wait, wait, how do I get here? The bathroom's all in the basement. Yeah. You got to go outside to go back in because you just added shit as you were going. It's all there. It's all there, but it's a mess.

5:01It's not a very functioning house. And the last one is Peacock. And that's simply you have everything and it's beautifully built, but it's similar to random. It doesn't really connect and help drive. So where am I going with this? As I was going through this, I realized that at the end of the day, if you're looking to exit, if you're looking to have some type of outside organization value you, they're not valuing you on your revenue. We think they are, but they're really valuing you on your potential. This is an investment. Where is this organization going to be? Now, of course, they're looking at market factors.

5:36They're looking at competition. They're looking at all that, but they're also looking at you. Where is your growth coming from? And if your growth is coming from a heroic environment, that undermines their trust that if you leave or they pluck you out or they invest in you and something happens, you can't replicate that revenue. Because Heroics relies on constant pushing and reaction. There's nothing that actually, no system that creates a steady, reliable, predictable approach. Usually Heroics has a lot of discounting in there that no one ever sees. No one ever sees that. You don't go into a CRM and see, oh yeah, we closed a$2 million deal and nobody saw that that$2 million deal started at 2.6.

6:19No one sees that, right? So that's where I'm going with this is the value to a dollar is based on the fluidity and the reliability and the predictability of the organization to deliver it over time. And how much of a difference does this make? If I have an organization that's done$10 million in revenue through Pure Heroids, and I have another organization sitting around that's done it in the most systematic, repeatable, predictable, stealable manner possible, what difference? Imagine they're in the same category. And so the investor looking at these two things, what's the difference? How much is one worth versus the other?

6:59Yeah, so I did a paper on this, and it's called Not All Revenue is Created Equal. and I suck at remembering numbers, but I want to say as I look it up that the discount could be as much as 15 to 20 % discount on the valuation, right? So it could be substantial. Or if you go against EBITDA, it could be, you know, or overall valuation, it could be 1.5 to 2 % versus 6 to 8%. So it could be three to four times lower. I did that math right, right? So it's substantial. It is really substantial. It's no joke. It's no joke. So if you want anybody wants to check me. Is the answer from moving from heroics and peacock and random into the true, you know, predictable revenue system, is it going to come from implementing gap revenue performance?

7:47And is that sort of the subject of the book? Yeah, look, he just teed me up. Whoop. He's just kind of walked into that, Sam. That was nice. As I said, Sam, let me read about yourself. So good at it. That was a beautiful thing. here. Just one or two books and it justifies your attendance on our show. Thank you. Thank you. Yes. And what we call, that's the fourth one called compounding. So we actually have a really quick and dirty assessment. It takes less than like four minutes to take. And we recognize that no one's all of one thing. No one's just heroics. No one's just random. No one's just Peacock.

8:20There's percentages. And we've yet to see a company that's compounding, leading with compounding, yet to see it, but that's where you want to go. And yes, Sam, it is about the system underneath. We call it the problem-centric operating system, but yes, you have to have everything connected. And if you don't have everything connected, then it starts to bleed. So I'll give you a really quick and dirty. We recognized that if you want to make anything work, but in our case, sales training from a system perspective, you have to recognize there are three distinct layers. Okay. So the book talks about going from knowing to performing.

9:02And when you break it down like that, most sales enablement, most training companies, et cetera, over-index in training. So we have a whole, what we call the training level, right? We train the people in a method, we sit them through a course, we maybe even have them certify against that course, et cetera. but then what do you do with it after that right and how do you define what the outputs are supposed to look like so i'll give you a perfect example this is going to piss the medic people off but do you know how many times i've seen people say we run medic and i'm like great run medic my first question is could you send me or show me the definition for each of those acronyms particularly metrics and implications.

9:47Please send me the documented definition of what those look like as it relates to your product, your customers, and how it drives the sale. And then could you show me how that's built into the CRM? Guys, what do you think the look on their faces when I asked them that? What do you mean a metric is a metric? Thank you. Thank you. So they spent a week, six months, whatever training in medic. Everybody knows what it is. Then I go to the opportunity opportunity layer and I'm looking in their CRM or I'm asking the managers, hey, you said this person checked off the metrics. What metrics did they check off?

10:22These, oh yeah, they got these six. I'm like, great. Show me this other guy. What did he, oh, they're five. They're different than those. Show me this. Oh, they're different. And then I say, well, how do those metrics drive to the sale? Like how does that increase the probability of closing a deal? I don't know. Right. So all of a sudden. This is a really common problem. So when at the beginning of my career, one of the largest software companies in the world, maybe I think the second or third largest sales team on earth in software, they asked us to come in and help them with trying to figure out why their hiring was a mess.

10:53And we did a bunch of analysis and we then ran a workshop to help them understand what to do. And at the start of that workshop, we had a room full of like, I think, 60 VPs and directors and there were whiteboards everywhere. And we said, tell us what you look for when you make hires? Like, what does great look like? What are you looking for? And everybody starts giving out things. I look for the way that they carry themselves. I look for their tenacity. I look for this. I look for that. And we just keep writing. We keep writing. We keep writing. We filled three whiteboards full of words. And then we said, okay, stop.

11:24These are all great things. None of these are necessarily the wrong thing to look for. But none of you have said the same thing. You don't have a common language. And so how can you talk to each other when you don't have common definitions in a common language. It seems like that is a common issue in go-to-market is that we use words like metrics and we think everybody thinks the same thing and we rarely mean the same thing. Is that what you see? I'm going to go one layer lower and I'm sure you did this. So I want to give you credit up front. Common language is awesome. But if I were doing this for recruitment for a sales org or any org, but, or we do it for a method and how you roll that method out, I would then have asked, okay, has anybody done an analysis on what is actually the most critical things to do the job?

12:17Right? So when you say that, well, I look for attitude. Okay, great. Attitude is important. And so I call that like a horizontal measure, right? Yeah, you have to have attitude, but I need to understand the vertical. So what does the job require specifically to do? And then how did you come to that decision? Right? Like, like, this is why, but why? Like, show me the job, show me the outcomes you're expected, show me the output that's expected, show me the processes required to get that output. So I was like, oh, I see why, right? And here's a great example I'll go with. A left tackle. Okay. Watch what I do here, everybody.

12:50And for those who don't follow football, I apologize. If I'm saying I'm looking to hire a left tackle for football. Okay. And we all agree that they have to be six foot seven or taller, have to have arm length of at least 38 inches. They have to be able to run a five, five. Uh, I mean, a four, eight or four, nine, you know, blah, blah, blah, five, five slow. Right. But we all agree on that. I'm like, great, good. We're in the ballpark. Then I ask you company a or football team a, what type of offense are you running? And they say, we're running an RPO. I asked the other one, what type of offense are you running?

13:24And they say, we're running a West Coast offense. Already, great, but there's another level of understanding a skill set for the left tackle that can actually perform in an RPO offense versus the left tackle who performs in a West Coast. You see what I'm saying? You have to understand the assignment. And far too often, we don't understand the assignment. But do you think, what are the qualities that map to different verticals in your opinion? Like what are the most common ways of describing to the point of, you know, a left tackle and RPO versus a left tackle and West Coast? When you think about types of sellers, what are the key differences where the attribute is still a positive attribute just has to be applied in the right vertical focus?

14:13Here's a great one. I see far too often, way over indexing on the product and way over indexing on a method like medical gaps like i don't really care and not enough understanding of business acumen for instance right or not enough understanding of the environment of which they're selling so i was working with a client the other day and we were going through this quickly excuse me quickly became evident to me that one of the reason they were struggling with discovery is because none of those people understood what the life of the IT manager was in a security environment. So they understood the root causes that, that, um, IT person was having, and they understood the business problems that could create, but they didn't understand what was in between.

15:00They didn't know what questions to ask because they didn't understand. And so I was like, we have to stand up a IT environment training to help these people understand. So either you hire for that, right? Or you have to train for that because you're not going to solve the problem with a method. Does that answer your question, Sam? It does answer my question. But the way I'm interpreting your question is, and tell me if I'm misinterpreting it, that the seller can function in different areas as long as we have the right training, the right resources, the right environment to help them understand that customer.

15:41And so mapping it back to the metaphor, there's still a profile of a left tackle, but we need to enable them and train them so that if it's RPO, they have a different understanding of what's happening with the offense than West Coast. This is a great conversation because I think one of the things where we're headed with And, you know, we talk about predictability and systems and truly understanding what's going on inside a sales team to identify what's broken. Today's world is very, very unpredictable. And things are massively happening all around. So it's quite interesting to, I mean, as you look at gap selling and the opportunity and all of these changes, how are you thinking about this left tackle this year versus this left tackle next year?

16:26and what they need to look like and how they fit into an offense that might not even exist right now and what that needs to look like too. So what it comes down to is really an understanding from the org perspective, right? So I think Sam said it and you said it. I have, let's say I drafted a left tackle for the West Coast offense and now we decided to move to RPO. I have one of two questions. Does this left tackle have the skillset to play in an RPO? And if so, am I providing the tools, the training, the coaching, the support to do it, or do I need to shift them? The problem is orgs are going too fast.

17:02That's where heroic comes in. They're going too fast. Nobody wants to slow down and actually ask, why did I not make my number? Why did I have to give that 20 % discount? Why are my average discounts across a year, two, three years in double digits, right? Am I even tracking that? Why is every end of a quarter a shit show? No one's stopping and asking. They're just like got the number. Woo. Yeah, everybody. Right. I got X amount of people on president's company. Yes. But no one starts slowing down. So to your question, if you build the system, you start to see what breaks in it as things change.

17:40So you can make the adjustments as you go. Yes. Have you seen hyperscalers that are currently doing this right now? They're doing it successfully and able to build these systems? No, no. It is so not only is it so foreign, our sales processes are so burdensome. We've lost more than we probably should have if we just said, okay, fine, we'll do it this way. Because we know it won't work. Like we know, part of this came from us training companies, taking six figure deals from people and then coming back to us and saying, we either need to do it again or it didn't stick, gap selling sucks. No, no, it was not the training.

18:17It was you didn't do any of the other things required to make it work. So that's why I built this, yes. I have a question on valuation. So going back to the premise here is that you can get to 10 million, 100 million, a billion in a bunch of different ways. And what that means for how the market views the value of your organization is different. And so as you were talking, I'm thinking, what are some organizations that have predictability through heroics? Does that exist? And the example that comes to my mind is a company like Blatstone. So Blatstone, private equity, it's kind of like a sales team, right?

18:55Private equity, the most important part of that job is sourcing deals, closing the deals, right? And so they're not getting paid$10 million a year because they can do financial analysis, but whereas they can source these deals, they can close these deals. When you look at the MDs at Blatstone, they function in a way that would align with Heroids. They all kind of have their own thing. Like I know one who his game was that from Wednesday to Friday, he would just travel around, meet people, build these long-term one-on-one relationships. He was horrible in presentations. He was horrible at conferences, but he was great one-on-one.

19:28Other people use a thought leadership approach. So they're doing a lot of conferences and writing and all these other things. So they all have a very disjointed way to create alpha. But at the end of every quarter, they have somehow predictably always delivered these numbers. And at the end of the year, they predictably delivered the yearly number and they keep growing again in a predictable manner. Is it that what you need is predictability and it doesn't matter how you get there, but the best way to get there is in a systematic way? But if you got there with heroics, that's fine too, as long as it's predictable.

20:03Or is it that it's not just predictability, it's how you get that predictability that matters? So I think it's a fantastic question and I need to think through my answer here. I think it's a strange question and a fantastic question. Strange and fantastic. That was my high school yearbook. So there's two angles I want to attack it. And I want to be careful. So I'm going to take it from the more positive one. There are products and services and brands that can predictably get revenue because of the market. So they have a tailwind. So I would tell you right now, you know, um, Anthropic and chat and NVIDIA probably now, you know, they're probably, they're going to continue to get this from the outside.

20:55If you will predictably because of a lot of tailwind, right. A lot going on in their favor. So yes, I think they can for a while now, BlackRock. I mean, I don't even want to touch that one. I mean, what is it? BlackRock state street van? Like, I mean, come on, man, really, you just killing me here. You just do me like a unicorn, right? that's a whole that i'll go with brand on that one now here's the interesting like brand plays a role there what i will say this though the other part of heroics is if they had a system i'm saying they don't by the way because some of the things you described as people doing things differently doesn't mean you you don't have a system a system doesn't mean every single person has to do the same freaking thing in our world the system is we know what we're looking for Oh, I love this.

21:41Say more, say more. Yeah, yeah. Because I think just to click into this, I think every other person that does what you do, basically downstream of what they teach is that we should all try to do the same thing over and over again. There's going to be this win-loss ratio that's favorable and that's how we win. And I think what you're saying is now actually quite different to a winning by design or a challenge or those things. So say more here. Yeah, it's not that everybody does the same thing. We as an organization understand what the outputs are and everybody is striving for the same outputs then if the system if the system holds watch what i do here if we have the guy who's constantly going out and meeting face to face and i see his even though he's making his number he's 10 20 30 percent below what everybody else is doing i'm going to challenge that method right so i'm not telling me can't you don't leave freedom to try shit which is what i think sometimes i like i think the best sales people are these creative geniuses who I find can make these game time decisions of what the right thing to do in this moment is, taking all the information into account.

22:46And two deals are very different. And so the same move here versus here will lead to different results. And so the salespeople I love are the ones that can make those calls really, really well. And I find that often what we're trying to boil it all down to is here's a script and just say it all the time. And if you say it all the time, then it'll all work out. And I think that that's something, but that's not sales as a coffee sales. That's not a system. That's not a system, right? Making people do everything the same is structure. Notice I never use the word structure. So let me give you the greatest metaphor.

23:19Let me give you the greatest metaphor. Because the reason I love it is I played football as a kid and I was tall and I was skinny. So I was not running people over. I picked all that I had amazing balance. I don't know why. Anyways. I had amazing balance. Yeah. It was the only thing that kept me up. I couldn't knock guys over. But if you hit me, I don't know. I could stay up. It doesn't matter. I was 6 '2 back in the day. I had a coach who hated my running style. Hated. He liked the short, squatty guys would just run people over. Right? So where am I going with this? I learned this in golf. If I, as a golfer, my coach could have hated my golf swing.

23:56but if the ball did what I wanted it to do it didn't matter so when I'm talking about a system what I'm saying is the organization understands the outcomes and results of what they're teaching so if you've ever watched I'm going to show my H a Lee Trevino swing versus it's horrible but his ability to hit the ball the way you're supposed to hit the ball for the shot required is all that matters. Now you can come in and say, Hey, Lee, you're doing this crazy shit. Keep doing that. But there's one thing I want you to think about because it's creating this output, which we know doesn't work. Do you see where I'm going?

24:33It's understanding the outputs and that your system is built to recognize when an output is not being created by the behavior, being able to quickly evaluate the behavior and say, ah, remember, these are the outputs we're looking for this behavior. I didn't teach it to you, but it's working. Keep going. And what you'll find is 80 % is the same. and it leaves room for the 20 % that's not because it's still allowing the outcome. Kenan, please tell me you're on the sidelines yelling down to Dion with all of this information. He could use it. He could use it a little bit. For those that are listening on Spotify or Apple, I see the Colorado football Buffaloes in the background.

25:12So I'm assuming you're a season ticket holder there too. No, but I'm a huge Buff fan. I go to most of the games, but yeah. You're a Buff fan, yeah. So going back to this, I absolutely love this. The golf analogy is totally relevant. We've all heard in sales that like you can fix one part of your swing and then another part of your swing is broken in sales. In sales methodology, same, same thing happens. I was curious when Austin comes back because what he's talking to is a archetype that I've never seen a sales team that has fully 100 % this, this like creative genius. Some people would call it a lone wolf to take the challenger sales a little bit, but this creative.

25:48I've never seen a sales team be fully, fully present in that way. And I'm wondering, Kenan, have you ever seen, and you said earlier, you haven't seen anyone ever take this and take it fully. And like, what's, what's really missing? What do they miss? They miss the hiring. They miss the consistency with leadership and taking this to fulfill fulfillment. What's missing? They're too focused on the behavior. When I wrote gap selling, I understood it, but I don't think I properly got it out and now I've done hundreds of trainings across thousands or tens of thousands of people, it became super clear to me.

26:22When you look at most sales methods, it's not to knock them, right? Even the one I think is the most close to gap selling, spin selling, they end up defaulting to the behavior. Ask these questions, do this, do that, right? Gap selling recognized that, and this is just the method, forget about the whole system. We're out of the system right now, just the method to your question, Gap Selling Recognized was built that we realized that the way you move a sale is getting the buyer to recognize that their current state is untenable and intolerable. That's how you make a deal. That's it. And if the customer can't get there, they don't think their current state is intolerable or untenable.

27:02They're not going to change. And sales job is to influence change. So what we do at the end of the day is we give you a whole set of potential approaches, like, I don't know, I'm looking for a bucket of stuff, jelly beans, and whatever jelly bean you pick out that can help that buyer quantify, you see what I'm saying? Define that problem. I don't care how you do it. So in our world and our system, the PCOS, we're not looking for, did the rep do this? We're looking for, did you get a defined problem? And we start with for your organization, because it's different Furby Org. Did you define the six or seven root causes?

27:43Were you able to define the frequency of that root cause and how it created the downstream impact and who's impacted not just internally, externally, et cetera? So at the end of the day, remember the golf analogy? I focus less on what your swing looks like. And I'm asking myself, are you able to hit a draw when you need to hit a draw? I don't care how that club comes around. As long as the minute it hits the ball, it's in the right angle to do what you want with it. And so that's what we're measuring. It's like, oh, he needed to do a draw here. It needed to go 200 to 225. He did it. I don't care what the rest look like.

28:15Oh, here's a deal. I need to see the problem having this type of measurement. I need to see the problem in this type of business requirement. I need to see the root causes look like this. They need to align. I want the data that a salesperson gets. I don't give a shit how the salesperson gets it. Nobody does this. I think a lot of the problems are that when we try to find examples of sales teams doing a certain thing, we just look at the teams that are officially called sales teams. But I think there's a lot to learn from by looking at organizations that have sales at the core of it, but they're called different things.

28:50So if you look at like venture capital firms, I think they're very analogous to sales teams, right? Like what's the job? You're sourcing deals. Well, like Insight does this. Well, Insight is a good example. Sequer says we're the best group of hunters in this market. And if you look at Sequer or Andreessen or Founders Fund, they're all kind of different. Within them, what are the commonalities? They have a group of people that all do play the game very differently. But at the end of the day, when they have to invest money, they have to write this investment memo, come into the partners meeting and have certain information that they have gathered that enables them to have that conversation around why we need to give this company this much money or that much money and they have been so successful so consistently year after year after year being this like almost artist colony of like people that are doing things their own way but coming out with predictable results and coming with like there is some consistency but they get to do it differently and I think it'd be so cool to find a sales team that does that and I it really annoys me that most of the sales teams end up defaulting to say this, do this, be this, like as if like salespeople are robots.

29:58Like that's the sales team that you can see getting automated away by some sort of, you know, AI technology. Whereas it's really hard to imagine AI technology automating away founders fund. There's six different people playing the game different. What are you going to automate, right? Like that's the issue. Do you want a really, really powerful metaphor analogy for what you just said? And I apologize to those who aren't sports fans. I'm just a sports fan. the greatest example of what you just described is college recruiting. Now, let me step back. Today's college recruiting? No, no. Not today's college recruiting.

30:34Let's step back from that one. But college recruiting before there was money, before there was money, gap selling is the perfect, what I'm describing, I'll take gap selling it. What I'm describing, this idea of getting information and understanding your market and et cetera. The reason that sometimes you'd all of a sudden see a five-star athlete go to someplace you weren't expecting because the better recruiters understood the person. They didn't just sell the school. They understood what type of home does he come from? Who's the most influential person in his life? Where is he struggling? What are his goals?

31:11Like his whole world. And they sit and they, before they even talk about the university, they know this kid inside and out so that when they say why you should come to my university they have built a one-to-one map to that person's life look man i i'm gonna make this up and i don't mean any offense but i'm a brother so i can do this hey man look i know that you you grew up in southern louisiana extremely poor i know your parents still married i know you're very religious and you're considering BYU. But I also want you to understand that BYU is an exceedingly upper middle class white neighborhood.

31:49I'm not sure that's the best place you would fit. I'm at Alabama, much more, right? So what I'm saying here is not to make, it's not a race conversation. So the idea is I understand you. Yeah. Right? And that's selling. But I can't do any of that. That's the whole point. Everybody keeps missing this. You can't do any of that if you don't stop first and try to understand, not your market, that's great, but that very person instead of people in the company sitting across from you with some problem they're trying to solve. This episode of Top Line is brought to you by Tourette. Every CRO is asking the same critical questions.

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33:03You can be live in 48 hours. book a demo at terret.ai. T-E-R-R-E-T dot A-I. This episode of Top Lines brought to you by DevRev. I want to tell you something I've been extremely excited about lately. Computer by DevRev. If you work in GTM or sales, you know what it's like. You're running a dozen deals at once and it's on you to remember every detail, what the customer said, what you promised, what needs to happen next. So things slip, a follow-up gets missed, a deal gets quiet. Computer by DevRev is an AI teammate that fixes that. computer uses something called shared memory to hold the full context of every deal across Slack, email, Granola, and Salesforce, even across the rest of your team.

33:41So nothing falls through the cracks and you always know exactly where every account stands. Your deals keep moving and you stay one step ahead. Take a look at computer.io forward slash top line. I like that. It's about data. Yeah. Data. Uh, it's well, first, I mean, it's a shared memory, uh, through computer, right? I think you said it in our show, Sam, like you can't, Someone said it. You can't remember. Oh, no, it was you, AJ. I can't remember everything, right? I'm going to talk. So I love this idea. I think that is, they're plugging a great hole because what is missed a lot of times is what the customer says.

34:13It's not written down. So, or conversations held outside of the system. I think that's a great, pull all that in. It tells you a lot. Kenan, I think it's a point around as a CEO, I just constantly, constantly ask my team to bring the right data to the table. And it's so, it's been so frustrating over the years and years that I just, we have all of this at our fingertips now. So we should be able to do this. This should be so easy. And it sounds like they've solved that. Yeah, it is. It is now easy. It's with computer. I'm going to go check it out. I like that one. Do it. Do it. Computer.io forward slash Topline.

34:49This episode of Topline is brought to you by Pavilion. Pavilion's GTM, trigger warning, GTM 2026. The name of the conference is coming to New York City, September 28th through October 1st. It's our biggest event of the year, and it marks Pavilion's 10-year anniversary. We're bringing together more than 1 ,000 of the best go-to-market leaders in the world for a few days of practical ideas, candid conversations, and the kinds of relationships that you cannot build over Zoom. No generic conference fluff. No endless panels where everyone agrees with each other. We are talking wrestling. We are talking aggressiveness.

35:24just great operators talking about what's actually working right now across sales marketing cs leadership and ai if you lead a go-to-market team or a sales team or a marketing team this is the room you want to be in attend gtm.com to learn more and register attend gtm.com you can use the code ambassador 20 for 20 off any ticket ambassador 20 keenan will you still come to our conference even though it's called GTM and we know you detest that name. I will. I will. And by the way, for the record, for the record, I love this. I don't have a problem with GTM because I think it's a real thing. I feel it's been co-opted by people who don't actually do GTM.

36:04Sales training, sales consulting, building sales team, sales enablement, that whole sales engine is not go to market. How you choose to point that engine is go to market. And that's a different story. And if you do both great, I just don't think someone could be great at both to be perfectly honest with you, but it is what it is. This conversation will be continued in New York City, September 28th through October 1st at Pavilion's GTM event. Asit AJ will be there. We're going to send Kenan a free ticket and hopefully he'll join us. I will be there. I commit. There we go. Let's go. There we go.

36:36Let's go. Another great, another famous person at Pavilion's GTM event that you might have the luxury of bumping into. Sam, why do you think that this is not the way that most of the training and the consultants in the market operate? And I didn't know this before coming into this conversation. I knew Japs and Sarah. I didn't understand it to this level. So this has been fascinating for me. Why do you think we default towards trying to turn these go-to-market teams into scripted, robotic, rinse-and-repeat machines? And most of the systems and methodologies, Why have they defaulted towards that?

37:15What do you think? Well, to the point of Kenan's comment at the beginning of the show, what the market values is predictability. And the way that people think about delivering predictability is by trying to make, it's, you know, Mark Roberge, our friend, wrote the sales acceleration formula where he's trying to isolate each element that leads to a closed deal and then get as much repeatability and consistency. Hire the same kinds of people, give them the same kind of leads, have them run the same process, all of it through the, what he viewed as basically a supply chain. So I think that's to add to that point though, is the thing that Mark did, I think a little bit differently is he followed the customer life cycle.

37:54He cared more about what stays as a customer. How do you actually sell from a value? The one-to-one, the reason I'm bringing this up, what Kenan's talking to is the one-to-one is so important when you're doing a recruitment to take it back recruitment, you're recruiting a player that's going to stay and not just transfer all four years in a previous world. So it's also like this idea of ICP around it also plays a really important part to it. I just wanted to... But it has been robotic, Sam, right? So like, say more there. Everybody agrees you need to deliver predictability. Everybody assumes that the way to do that is by training the same people, hiring the same kinds of people, doing as much the same as possible.

38:33That way, you can test and iterate more effectively because you have more constants. and I think what Kenan is describing first of all I think the point that you made Asit is a brilliant one and it is that there's so many other functions that are at their core sales that we don't recognize as being in sales and so we exclude them from the conversation and for me I think venture capital is great you know coaches is great also agents you know like Hollywood agents and talent agents. And I, a place I think of, and I think Blackstone is also great, like all kinds of high-end, you know, private equity firms, boutique investment banks, those people do operate differently.

39:15They do operate differently. So what is the common bond? Kenan might say it is the process or some kind of, well, you'll correct me, Kenan, so I'll let you speak for yourself, but I think it is culture. You know, I think like you can have, I just remember hearing Mike Ovitz talk about CAA. He didn't hire all the same. They were alike in the most important attributes, which is that they had a deep, deep desire and wanted to win. And they were willing to do almost anything to get there. And within that context, they were free to be individualistic and unique. And I feel that's probably very similar to Blackstone.

39:50I've had friends that work at Blackstone, and it's similar to what you said, Asim, which is everybody's not doing exactly the same thing. Everybody's brilliant in their own way, but everybody is fiercely competitive and desperately wants to win. And I think maybe...

40:30right? So who's the customer? We need to understand them. And then we need to have some sort of a framework of how do you know that you have the right information? What information are you trying to gather to then decide what to do next? And that has to actually be very structured. If you structure there, you can be like the wildest person on earth. Like I remember in my second year at STA, I never came to the office before 11am. In every other company, you guys would have fired me, right and i never came 11 was the earliest i'd ever come you know that i kicked people i like if they weren't ass in seat by 8 30 they had to go home i literally sent everyone home that wasn't in the seat i remember calling jamie and being like yo i hate the morning so i'm gonna come at like 11 do you care he's like i don't give a shit come whenever you want just kill it i was like that's cool and i said it was different like that's why i always like stayed there because it was like this place lets me be me and find myself more and more.

41:29And I think that was really attractive. And I find that there's fewer and fewer organizations that call themselves sales teams that let that happen. Whereas there's a lot of other organizations that have sales at the core that very much let that happen. Many of them, by the way, many of them, Asad, that are much higher productivity than what you would call a traditional sales organizations where the revenue per employee or the revenue per business development executive is much, much higher than in a hardcore sales organization. Sean McGuire at Sequoia is a very productive human being, right? Like his P &L on himself is fantastic and he does it in a very different way to everybody else.

42:07Kenan, in your - Wait, before your question, I want to drop something to what Sam said because I really want everybody to understand this and I know I talk fast, I get excited, etc so i want to really slow down okay everything you guys said is spot on but the key to this is i believe there is some level of physics okay everything we do everything there is a right and wrong in my opinion so using this analogy using golf the people who miss it from a sales perspective is because they don't understand what happens to a golf ball when the club head hits it. It's physics there. They don't understand it.

42:58They know what they want it to do. And they know what a swing looks like when the ball does what it's supposed to do. So they just say, all right, I watched this guy swing or this girl swing. It went straight. I want it to go straight. So that's what I want them to do. They never stopped and did the research on how a club head hits the ball at what speed, where the face is angled, et cetera, and how that plays into a course at dog legs left, right, et cetera. Okay. So where I was going with this is at the end of the day, if you understand where that club head supposed to be when a minute hits the ball, I don't care how you get it there.

43:35Going back to your boy, Adam Sandler, right? Like happy, I don't care. The physics was accomplished. So take that into sales. In my opinion, I call this sales physics. The sales physics is nobody buys anything unless their current state is untenable and intolerable. They will not change. So if you don't understand for your company, your industry, your customers based on your product, what a customer must be experiencing at as deep a level as possible that would cause them to spend a half million dollars, a million dollars, a hundred million dollars or$5 ,000. If you don't understand what is behind the psychology of them to say, yep, I'm going to switch and yep, I'm going to switch to you.

44:30if you don't understand that, then what you're going to do is you're going to focus on the swing, which is how you sell. And that's what most people miss. Go, Sam. I agree with everything you're saying. And I think we read a few books on psychology, but not actually that many. The books I know are Cialdini or Cialdini, however you say his last name and the book Influence and Persuasion. But I don't know that many books about how do people actually make decisions and why do they make choices. And it's a really interesting point, because in the absence of understanding that you're just trying to shove as much stuff into the bucket and say, like, well, do you like this?

45:14Do you like this? I can make it red. I can make it pink. I can make it yellow without ever under. Anyway, it's a great point because. And doesn't it feel crazy that we try to find product market fit without knowing that stuff? Because the idea of product market fit is like you're trying to look for a wound where blood is like just spurting out of it. And then you create the best bandage on earth for that wound, right? Like that's the thing that gets prioritized. That's the thing that they'll buy from somebody who is really new in their life cycle, a new company that's the risk you have to buy from.

45:44You'll buy it from them because they have the best solution for something that is extremely painful. but you need to understand the customer in such a deep manner, like practically like the pain point itself and then the psychology of the person to be able to like figure out how to do this. And we, we rarely do it. This is probably more important to us than ever, ever with so many founders on the market and you're doing founder led sales and products are so commoditized, really understanding your customer is really sometimes the only differentiator that you could possibly offer to this world because anyone can build the blue widget or the red widget.

46:18in today's world and understanding that the pain point, I think Never Split the Difference did a pretty good job on the, like there was - AJ, on that actually, I have a question for you. Yeah. One of the things with founder-led sales that's interesting is how much further founders are going with it. So I just spoke to a company this week, founders at six or$7 million in ARR, one person, kid, you know, like 20 years old. You told us about this guy before, we love this guy. Half a million dollar deals, just killing it. And one of the things I think about is is you've got this market that is buying right now.

46:52Like the market's buying shit, right? And so part of like figuring out product market fit is like where the resistance is and where it's not, right? But right now it just seems like the market's like, yeah, man, that agent that does that sounds cool. Like here's some money, let's try it out, right? And so it must be really hard for founders to actually figure out like, but do I have product market fit? Or is it just like the buyer doesn't know what they're doing? They need to spend on AI. They'll spend on anything that sounds cool. How do you find product market fit when the buyer is being so loose with their money?

47:26So first thing, let me address one thing you said. The market is buying. They are buying some things right now. There are a lot of things that are not being bought. They're buying some things. We talked about those things. Well, there's extreme product market fit in GPUs or in AI infrastructure or cybersecurity. but where we are struggling and where i think this is the innovator's dilemma is that every founder needs to be on the front lines we've talked about being hands-on keyboard every founder needs to have customer conversations because your your product has to evolve so the example i can use is for quotapath i i told the board in july's board meeting i'm going to have 30 cfo conversations over the next three months we're doing a road show i'm in new york this week I'm going to be in San Francisco next week.

48:12We're doing dinners. I have Pablo Dominguez for a Q &A on Thursday. Kyle Norton next week in San Francisco. We're doing Q &A. And I am really just doing listening. Everything I need to do is about this behavior that Kenan is talking about. This behavior is more important than ever right now because this behavior is changing. People's behaviors and mind shares are changing. How we think about the world is changing. Our products are changing. So it's more important than ever to really think about this. And then, you know, of course, we're going to use AI to record all of these conversations because I'm going to miss things.

48:43There's going to be levels and layers that we need to understand after the fact in retro and figure that what is the connecting bond between all these pieces. And I'm I'm not a robot, so I can't possibly connect all of those. I can see all of it. But the bestseller in the world might be able to connect this. That's not me. And so I have to use a tool to be able to help connect those. on this. Keenan, one of the things I think about is you've got a bunch of things that come together to be able to lead to velocity and go to market. You've got product market fit. You've got then the systemization of your sales methodologies and processes, the measurements of it.

49:25You've got the people. And so there's all these different things. And a bunch of firms that train and consult in go-to-market quite prolifically, when you boil down what they say, they say that product market fit is this early stage problem after which success and failure is all down to whether or not you get go-to-market right or not. And getting go to market right is basically downstream of do you develop the right infrastructure? Do you know how to measure that infrastructure correctly? And the people piece gets like thrown as like the last variable in the equation. And I'm curious, how do you view this stuff like product, people, systems, methods?

50:11Like, how do you stack rank this? Like, what's the most important stuff? You can get two things right. What are those two things? Oh my goodness gracious, bro. That was a giant question. I want to say, I think it depends on where you are. So if you're talking, you're coming out tomorrow. Okay. Like you're, so you're brand new to me. It's awareness, hands down. It's awareness. Okay. So my daughters, I told you, my daughter just started this AI native company and we went back and forth and how we were going going to launch it for him. And I was like, guys, we're going to focus on the University of Colorado.

50:47Okay. That's it. A hundred percent focused on that. You go to the school, you're in sororities, you got classes, just ignore every other school. Let's just ignore it. So now what you have to do is figure out every way to get as much awareness. Okay. So they say, I don't know if this is right or not. So anybody want to check me if you're a, you know, a stat guy and hate when people say shit, it's not true. But if you're that guy, they say that nothing sticks for somebody that's new until after the seventh or eighth exposure. Right? So what I've told my daughters is, okay, I want you to go to all the fraternities and see if you can get them to let you put up big vinyl things for all their parties.

51:22And it says, hippo, study less, party more. You know what I'm saying? So they see it. I want you guys to be dropping stuff into the local, it's called Yik Yak. Don't worry about it. And it's a college-based thing. It's been around forever. Yik Yak has been around forever. So I said, I want you in that. And even if people give you a hard time about it, it doesn't matter. People just see in it. I want flyers all like I want okay I'm making this so the first one is awareness awareness awareness so whatever your go-to-market is you're barking uphill if you don't have awareness I watched over and over subpar um uh companies yeah yeah start startups right startups win because they had money behind them they got exposure or they did a better job of getting exposure as you move further on and it's I don't say crowded market but you have competition the next question becomes how are you getting people into your pipeline right so to be honest with you one of the things i hate this is probably going to piss some people off i am so tired of the word go to market i am so over it okay go to market is basically where am i pointing where am i pointing my resources and how did i come up with that now if you're a true go to market company you are not a sales consulting and training firm i'm not mentioning any names but i watch a lot of going, oh, we're a go-to-market firm.

52:38You might go to market firm or you might sales training and consulting, right? Because go-to-market says, I'm going to point XY resources to exposure, right? I'm going to point XYZ resources to advertising. I'm going to point XYZ resources to just the University of Colorado. That's a go-to-market strategy. Okay. That is not a sales consulting strategy. So one is like strategic consulting, commercial strategy at the strategic level. The other one is like, how do you get this? Sam, how do you think about this? Sam's going to rename GTM, I guess, in two weeks. Well, listen, Paul Graham had that post and we talked about it.

53:24And I honestly, at this point, if you ask me today, I agree with Kenan. The thing I like about you, Kenan, is that the reason that all those other firms that you compete with call it go to market because they're embarrassed about the word sales and they feel self-conscious about it and they feel like 100 % what they do and you're just like fuck it uh we're a sales training company and we're a sales consulting company because we help people make sales and I really appreciate the purity and the honesty of that I I love what you just said because I feel like I I think about why I get so activated by all of those people and I think that I love salespeople because it's such a hard job.

54:05It's so difficult to basically decide that for the rest of your life, you're going to create stability and security for yourself and your family by taking things somebody has built and selling it into the market. And half your income is based on your performance. And it's the most measured role on earth, meaning that the minute your performance dips, you have a family issue and you get distracted. Performance dips, you have a quarter or two and then you're out. And you're out a couple of times in a row in short stints, then your career is like taking a real left. It is a really unique profession.

54:37And when people try to like negate it as like this person is less important, it's all about like the stages and the measurements and this, I get really annoyed by that. It's like, no, no, no, no. Like those things are really nice to have, but this is the person that takes this thing into the market and makes it happen. And like, don't negate that. That's a really like noble thing that they do. The economy works because these people decide to live life this way. Sam, can I add to something you just said? Yeah, of course. And then I've got a question for you. Yeah, excellent. So I love what you said, Asad.

55:09Or Asad, sorry, if I got it wrong. I apologize. You can say it both ways. You can go either way. All right. And Sam, what you said, and we are unabashedly, we help sales. But what caused me to write this, I should have written in the beginning, but you got to learn as you go, right? Is I love salespeople. Yep. And I love selling and I want to help them better. But from an organizational perspective, the function of sales, CRO, executive VP, I don't really care what you call it, from that function down is the least sophisticated, the least elegant organization in the entire org. The level or the lack of structure, the lack of sophistication, the lack of systems that are connected and tied that can be reliable of them all, out of them, you would never be able to get away in finance, which you get away with in sales.

56:05You'd never be able to get away with in HR, which you get away with in sales from a function perspective. So the answer is, I'm not just proud of it. I have a deep passion to fix it. like if you really think about it if you all could pick like any ceo in the world you have a magic wand and you get to pick one function and it'd be a close tie depending and it'd be fair hr finance it product operations sales and you get to major wave a magic wand and one is guaranteed to be the best on earth you're either picking sales or product or that's it yeah that's it i would not Product, yeah. Yeah. So, and I think that's fair, right?

56:49Because you can't out-serve shitty product. But those two are like this, right? If you think about how they're actually operated on and executed on and how it's done, sales is way the frick down here. So, yes, Sam, we're unabashedly passionate about it because I see the org and the person. Would you take a, Keenan, would you take a B-plus product with literally the world's number one sales team or the world's best product with like a B or C sales team, which one would you pick? I would take the world's best product. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's just product makes everything else life. But here's the crazy part, right?

57:26This is where you win. The world's best product only lasts so long because then you get competition. Think about manufacturing, right? Manufacturing was like, I'm making this up, but not really. Manufacturing at the turn of the century is like AI now. Do you see what I'm saying? So you had a manufacturing plant back in the day, hey, you would make, you would this. And then all of a sudden, manufacturers become commoditized. So you better have the best damn sales team in the world to outperform. So yes, in the moment tomorrow, give me the world's best product. If I have to run that company for 100 years, give me the world's best product for the first seven or eight.

57:59Now give me the best sales team for the Moraning 95. Interesting. AJ, you were saying. The thing that you just said, you just talked about the investment in sales being way down lower than anything else. Not money investment. commitment to that's what i wanted to clarify on because so many companies spend so much resources and dollars to fix sales it's the commitment over a longer period of time if i'm hearing you correctly that it's failing yes yeah here's another good example for you i know you have a question sam but i'm fired up i used to be like it i used to be a ski instructor okay this one maybe maybe subconsciously this is how i got here with sales i was a ski instructor for 14 years if I hear another person tell me they're a good skier again and I get on the mount with them fuck you I already know as a matter of fact I already know I already know right me and my friends joke if we meet someone for this first time you say you could oh yeah I'm a great skier we know they suck we already know they suck right and so the point being is back to the the club hitting the ball or understanding the information these people measure being good is their ability to get down the hill they can go fast there is compared to their friends they're they're slightly better.

59:08They don't fall. You see what I'm saying? They can ski any terrain, but then you take them against my buddy Shannon, or I mean, I'm a decent skier. I'm a big mobile skier. And you go side by side and they're gone. Like they can't, they can't, they can't do it on any terrain. They can't do it properly. They can't maintain their speed. Like no. So the same thing is what you're talking about. These, these people have spent years skiing. Do you see what I'm saying? They spent years. The Parents could have took him as kids. They may even move to a certain town, but what didn't they do? They never spent the time to understand.

59:42Learn. Learn how skiing actually works. They just kept doing it and doing it and doing it. And they're good. I mean, compared to the average person, they're good. But no, they're not a good skier. And that's what sales is guilty of. We have been doing it and doing it and doing it and doing it. And no one stopped and said, wait, what is actually good selling? I love all these sports analogies, by the way, Keenan, mostly because Asit doesn't understand any of them. My favorite was the RPO reference. The RPO reference was, it was the chef's kiss of references that Asit has no idea.

1:00:21Question. In the age of AI, one of the opportunities is that building product has become easier. And downstream of that, every company just creates more and more product than they've ever created before. For every million dollars of revenue, if you compare a$10 million company today to a$10 million company from pre-AI, the amount of product that they have and the speed at which they're releasing product is very different. And that creates a sales training challenge because as a salesperson, it's overwhelming when every week, every two weeks, there are new releases, new things that we're selling, new problems we're solving for our customer, new ways to have to understand us and this customer and the connection point.

1:01:03How do you think about this challenge from a training perspective? Like, you must be thinking about this a lot. How do we rationalize the amount of enablement that we need to do now? Like, how do we solve that problem? Okay, so I'm going to go back to physics. Like, this is why what we do holds, okay? Now, there are exceptions, but you said something really interesting. You said, you're creating all these products and all these new problems.

1:01:33very rarely does a company solve a new problem they may solve a new root cause that leads to the same business problem right so what do i mean by that how do i how am i going to do this one so it makes sense for everybody i'm going to use sales because it's the most well known in the sales world we believe and this is what we do something called a problem identification chart. If you're interested, I can explain more. So what we have done with our organization, we teach this to our customers. What are the four or five or six business problems you solve? Because there's never more than that for any product, period.

1:02:10Everyone's worked by the eight, but no, they're finite. There can be a million root causes, and I'm going to explain this different in a second. So in our world, and you guys will get this, the business problems that our competition solves, that maybe Gong solves, Winai AI solves. I don't care. It could be technology could be. It doesn't matter. It's sales and they are. Not making quota or quota attainment by rep. Low win rates, long sales cycles, low average ASP. I can throw in there high CAC. Okay. Can we agree on that? If you sell it to a sales organization, any type of sales thing, these are the problems they could have before you show up, right?

1:02:51A win rate's too low. it takes too long to close a deal we're discounting too much which is low cac do i disagree with those business problems there's no more of those there's none so if all of a sudden gong creates a new feature that's supposed to solve a problem i'm going to make this up let's say it solves the problem of um of uh balancing legends forecast uh okay what's this forecasting is a root cause that leads to not making quota. You see what I'm going? Right? So this is what we do. It's so powerful. So if they fix a thing that fixes forecasting, which I'm okay with, that's great. But the problems haven't changed.

1:03:31I just have to add one thing inside of enablement that says, hey, here's another root cause. Because what we do is we identify root causes. Here's a root cause that they haven't been able to forecast properly, which has affected their win rates or they're affected their quota attainment. You see what I'm saying? Or affected their CAC, right? Any one of those. And so this is how we solve this root cause. So no, it's not overwhelming if you start up front. And then if they do create a one that's completely outside of the box, it says, I don't know, we help with ledger reconciliation. My first question to the company is, why are you now talking to CFOs?

1:04:06I'm doing ledger reconciliation. Right, like you just took, that's a real different problem. Why did you take a left turn over there and what are you trying to do? And if that's justified, you need to retool your sales team or hire different salespeople to address that separate problem. That's a whole different buyer. Like, you see where I'm going with this? So that's how we handle it. We cover it on the front end. What problems do you solve? What are the impacts or the root causes? Yes, Sam. Here's my question. And it'll be the closer, I think. But it's a big one. So we'll have lots to talk about.

1:04:34Everybody for my whole life has told me how broken sales teams are. Every consulting person presents a benchmarking report saying the profession of sales is broken. And nobody's ever seems to be happy with sales. But here we are and the economy grows and we close deals. My question is, what is your level of optimism? Like how much of it is systemic and not fixable? And maybe part of the answer to sales is it's like venture capital, which is that there's a power law distribution. There's a small number of people that are going to be absolutely fantastic. And most people are going to suck. and all of this conversation around it is noise to maybe lift the average performers maybe five or ten percent but basically what how do you react to that statement because everybody's always telling us how much the industry's broken the profession's broken as if there's some utopian ideal where like everybody's at 100 percent quota team but that's yeah nobody's ever going to live in that world i love the distortion what let me put it i have a bunch of answers but what do you think, Sam?

1:05:40I think that, I think it's a venture capital. I think it's power law. I think there's a group of people and I think there's a group of people that want to learn, that are curious, and those people can become great at a lot of different things. And there's a whole bunch of other people that just need a job that aren't particularly curious and aren't particularly ambitious. And you can put anything you want in front of those people and it's really not going to work very well. And that's what I think. And that's why like a lot of those companies that say, oh, the problem is you're not tracking this information, like you're not doing this the correct way, your growth loops aren't in place.

1:06:17It's like there are a lot of places where they grow and nothing changes. And it's like not everything can fly, but it is very much like venture capital where you will have, there are some sales teams and even broadly some go-to-market teams that are just magical. Like you see them in action, you're like, wow, like that was like PTC back in the day was cool. Like it was like, holy shit, like you have a product that is basically the same as your two closest competitors. And you have won that category because you've built this sales team of bunch of barbarians who are just so good at their job. And they've delivered quarter after quarter for 10 years straight, you've crushed numbers and hit expectation.

1:06:59It's cool. And there are more and more examples of that now than there were before. So two things. One, Asad, I want to reframe you. So everything you're saying is accurate, but in our entire conversation, your worldview is like this first one to 10 years. Almost everything you brought up, almost everything we talked about, there's nothing wrong with that. By the way, do not read into what I'm saying. But when I look at sales, I look at it across the entire industry. We have customers that are manufacturers. Literally, I just did a proposal for a company that builds stokers, which are these giant boilers that you used to put coal in, but now you put bio stuff in that burns, that generates energy.

1:07:41You know what I'm saying? That is not on your radar, but they have a sales team. They have to move these. And there's only something like six a year that ever get put in. Do you see what I'm saying? So when I look at sales, I don't look at it tied to product. I look at it from a framework perspective across a hundred at-bats or a thousand at-bats across Little League all the way to the All-Star game. Do you see what I'm saying? So that no matter where I'm putting this in, I know that I'm going to maximize the outcome. That's how I look at everything. So to your point, Sam, I agree with you. By the way, I agree with you.

1:08:21When it comes to the person, you're never going to score 100 % on people. I mean, again, using the analogies, you go, AJ. When you look at drafts, right? Every sport drafts, and they spend millions of dollars and all the data to pick the right person, right? And yet two teams didn't pick Michael Jordan before Michael Jordan got picked. You see what I'm saying? So, right. And the Green Bay Packers picked Mandarich. Now I'm way too old mouth but anyways i digress and what round tom brady was was the sixth round last six rounds yeah uh two something 250 or 249 or something a draft is when people go on stage

1:09:01you know but here's what i want to say to them and it's already proven out if you're looking at the draft success as whether or not someone has a good organization you're getting it wrong. It's because what do they do over time? What are the processes allow them to do over time? And outside of money, why do some organizations continually outperform others, right? Why are the Jets continually crappy? I'm sure there's ownership, but I can tell you if I knew football well enough, I bet someone could win and tell you how they run that organization versus how another organization is run based on their understanding of using the metaphor, or how that club head is supposed to hit the ball, you have major issues.

1:09:44So I think, Sam, the reason we're not there is one, the pressure to make the number. No CRO is given the time. He or she is like, go make it happen now. No dips are accepted. No misses are accepted. And so they end up defaulting. Now to your point about the culture, it just forces them to do it. But here's why it's awful. The culture eats them a lot. So if they can't make it happen in 18, 24 months, they throw them out and bring someone else in and expecting them to fix it. Right. It's the boat's got a hole in it. I know the boat's got a hole in it. You got to fix it. But by the way, you cannot dry dock the boat.

1:10:20You're not allowed to get out of the boat. You're not allowed to and try to do it from underneath. You're not allowed to ask for resources that we could ship out to you to fix the boat. So figure out how the fuck you're going to fix the boat and get us moving in the right direction. If you don't do it, I'm going to get someone else. Right. That's the pressure the sales world is under. so it's not conducive to fixing it, right? And that's one of the reasons we built what we built. We can actually do this with the plane in the sky. It's interesting that to continue the sports metaphor, I'm thinking of Bill Belichick and Mike Tomlin, to your point, as the antithesis to what you're saying, which is people that were given the time and the years and the space to build the system and the team their way.

1:11:00and that is not, can you imagine a CRO working somewhere for 15 or 20 years? That's not even a thing and maybe it should be. You got it. I was just going to say, and that brings us all the way back to that concept of heroics, right? Like they are results of the world that we built, whether it's the PEs putting the pressure on, whether it's the CEO putting the pressure on, the pressure is on and no one is really willing to give them the time to do it right. But here's the plus. If they would just, if the sale themselves would just slow down a little bit and stop executing heroics, like that's why I wrote, okay, big plug, right?

1:11:37That's why I wrote this book. Let's go cap revenue performance. Yes. Is we have built a system that you can implement on the fly that identifies the holes, allows you to plug the holes without stopping. I got a train, but outside of that, without stopping, without having to, you know, dry dock the boat, right? So it's there, but people just have to stop and be open and be like, okay, what am I doing wrong? Last question before we wrap, Kenan, and it's one that I know is on Asit's mind. In the great tradition of one-named people, Cher, Bono, The Edge, how did you get to just one name? Tell us the history of why you are just Kenan, and then we want to sell some books for you.

1:12:25Thank you. So it's actually a decent story. So in the second part of my life, I don't know, college and beyond, I would say 50 or 60 % of my friends just called me Keenan, right? So they would just, it was Jimmy when I was younger and then it was Jim. And then all of a sudden it started to be Keenan. So Keenan is not even your first name. It's literally like - No, it's my last name. Jim Keenan is my name. So everybody knows, trivia, Tecumseh, the Indian in Shears by the door. But anyways, so you get that, Sam. Thank you. So then I was mostly Keenan 50-50 and then social media came out. And so I had to start creating profiles.

1:13:03And so I didn't want to do Jim Keenan. So I got Jim Keenan on Twitter and Fred Wilson, friend, I haven't talked to him in years, but he was very, Fred was a very nice guy to me. I was younger and he was accessible. And And so we went out to dinner and we talked a lot. I haven't talked to him in years anymore, but I digress. And he was an investor in Twitter. And I had noticed one day that Keenan was available. The Keenan was gone. Like the guys who had it was gone, but I couldn't register the name. So I remember I was on a ski lift and I called him. I said, hey, I think Keenan's available, but I can't get it.

1:13:36This is a great story. This is amazing. Yes. I love it. So I called him and he said, okay, hold on. Or I text him. It doesn't matter. But I got to hold him. And within like 24 hours, he's like, oh, it's yours now. So I grabbed Keenan. Now remember, besides Facebook, Twitter was the big thing at once. You see what I'm saying? Yes, absolutely. So I was Keenan. I was Keenan on Twitter. And then I kept trying to get Keenan, couldn't know the case, but I kept sticking, sticking, sticking. And then it finally stuck when I was with, I won't belabor the story, but Jill Conrad said at one point that I had this brand going.

1:14:07And the minute she said brand, I went, oh. So then I just dropped Jim from there. And that's been the brand the rest of the way. So wait, Fred Wilson, I think it's a smart move, by the way. No, so Fred Wilson literally text Jack Dorsey is what happened. Or someone. Literally that happened. I didn't say Dorsey. I just said I called him and he got it taken care of. That's great. All right, Keenan, let's help you sell some books. So just where can we find Gap Revenue Performance and who should buy it? If you are the ideal customer profile for buying this book, who should buy this book? Great question.

1:14:40And you can get it on Amazon. It's really easy, right? Just run Gap Revenue Performance. It is new, but yes. and this book is for, I would say, anybody who's responsible for the output of a sales team. Now, the two primary targets, I would say, if you are a sales enablement person, any of you, but particularly if you run 50 or more, 100 or more, and your job is to improve their performance, you have to have it. And if you're a CRO, if you're not, in my opinion, it's probably pissing people off. If you don't read this, you will never really truly understand what your job is and what levers you can pull.

1:15:17That's a big claim. Yeah, you're missing the levers. And I'll leave you with this, and this is why I can make this claim. In 2012, depending who you ask, 60 % of reps made quota. I'm going to butcher this because it's been a while, but something like we were spending like$12 billion or$10 billion in enablement, training, tools, the stuff. Now, 23%, depending on who you see, or 16 % of people are making quota, and the spend has gone up 7x. So around 2017, 18, it went inverted. Am I doing that right? All of a sudden, the spend passed and the output went down from a quota attainment perspective. So we're spending more and more and more and more and getting less and less and less and less.

1:16:12Something I hear often is, yeah, well, that's quota. And they send unrealistic quotas and they do it on purpose. Like, fine, I'll give you that one. But win rates declined by 29%. Sales cycle is extended by 37 days. So no, I'm not giving you that one. What we're investing in isn't working. And it's because all the way back to what you asked me before sam i don't believe organizations truly understand how the clubhead is supposed to hit the ball and on that note well one one one last thing sorry sam we had mark roberge on science of scaling i love mark he he read and gave me a props on it so there you go thanks mark uh i said the first 20 top line listeners that that send me a message send me a personal message i will buy the book i'm gonna make that same promise here i'm buying it of course myself and so if you're out there, you're listening, shoot me a message, LinkedIn or over Slack, Pavilion, Topline, and I will buy the book for you all.

1:17:11So we're going to sell at least 20 books. That's great. I love that. Thanks, AJ. Hugging a kiss, AJ. Thank you. That's nice. There we go. Kenan, thanks so much for being our guest on Topline. Everybody go grab Gap Revenue Performance and give us five stars wherever you get your podcasts and please do subscribe and follow us on YouTube. it's topline-media for our YouTube handle. Thanks everybody for listening. We'll talk to you next week.

1:17:41If you are looking for more Topline, check out the Topline newsletter at toplinemedia.substack.com. That's toplinemedia.substack.com. Or if you're a video person, check us out on YouTube. top line dash media is what you want there have a delightful day everybody