The Revenue Room™ with guest Amy Roman, Founder & CEO, AmplifyGTM

Welcome to The Revenue RoomTM, where we explore the critical roles that drive business growth and success. Hosted by industry expert Heather Holst-Knudsen, each episode explores the multifaceted world of revenue generation, from marketing and sales to customer success and strategic partnerships.

In this episode, Heather sits down with Amy Roman, CEO of Amplify GTM, to discuss the intricacies of driving sustainable revenue growth in B2B environments. With her rich background spanning consumer packaged goods to IT-managed services, Amy brings a wealth of knowledge and actionable insights. 

Whether you're a business leader aiming to scale your organization, a sales professional seeking to enhance your skills, or simply someone interested in the dynamics of revenue generation, this discussion is filled with practical advice to help you align your teams and strategies for optimal performance.

Heather and Amy discuss:

• Balancing Art and Science in Revenue Growth: Combining data utilization with gut instincts.
• Customer Pain Points and Challenges: Techniques for understanding and addressing customer pain points.
• Data Activation Challenges: Overcoming obstacles in understanding and actioning data for revenue growth.
• Aligning Roles and KPIs: Why you need to align critical roles with KPIs.
• Sales and Marketing Alignment: Addressing common misalignments between these departments.
• Customer Centricity: The role of customer success and service delivery based on organization size.
• The Role of a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO): Skills, experience, and responsibilities for success 
• Maximizing Customer Spend: Importance of cross-selling and upselling within account management teams.

Tune in to gain valuable perspectives and actionable tips that will empower you to unlock your company's full potential and stay ahead in the competitive market.

Don't miss this episode if you are looking to refine your go-to-market strategy, enhance team alignment, and drive sustainable revenue growth. Subscribe to our channel on h2klabs.com for more insights and upcoming episodes.

About RevvedUP 2026
RevvedUP 2026 is where CEOs and revenue-critical C-Suite leaders reset their growth playbook for the AI-first economy. Taking place March 23–24, 2026 at The Vinoy Resort in St. Petersburg, FL, this two-day strategy lab helps leaders pressure-test how AI moves from cost center to growth driver and turn data and disruption into competitive advantage.

About Heather Holst-Knudsen
Heather Holst-Knudsen is the founder and CEO of H2K Labs and Revenue Room™ Connect. A seasoned executive and operator across media, marketplaces, events, and technology, she specializes in digital transformation, data-driven growth, and customer-centric value creation. Heather shares her insights on multisided business models through The Revenue Room™.

About Revenue Room™ CXO
Revenue Room™ CXO is a private executive community for CEOs and revenue-critical C-Suite leaders navigating growth in the data and AI economy. Through curated peer discussions and strategy sprints, members tackle real-world challenges in revenue transformation, customer intelligence, and business model innovation.

Learn more or apply for membership at info.h2klabs.com/apply-cxo.

Transcript

0:00

Welcome to the Revenue Room, presented by H2K Labs. Here's your host, Heather Holst-Knudsen. Hi, I'm Heather Holtz Knudsen. I am the CEO of H2K Labs. We are a tech enabled value creation specialist focused on multi sided business models. I'm super excited today to welcome Amy Roman, who is the CEO of Amplify GTM. Amy, welcome. Thank you so much, Heather. It's a pleasure to be here. Why don't you tell everyone about your background, which I find fascinating in all of the industries that you've worked in, especially on the GTM side.

Speaker 6 0:40

Oh, thank you. It's been a long and circuitous journey, longer than I'd like to admit, but I always like to start out by telling people, and it usually solicits a chuckle, that I was president of my high school marketing club. So that definitely speaks to my cool factor or lack thereof in high school. And so I've honestly wanted to be in business and marketing and anything on the front side of the business for as long as I can remember. And I started out at large. consumer packaged goods companies working in a variety of sales and marketing roles throughout. So at this point I've sold or marketed everything from batteries to hair color to allergy and antifungal medicine. Wow. Yeah, it was very interesting. And from there, about 10 years ago, I was in a networking group because I was running a branding and design agency, and I met a CEO of an IT managed services provider, and that's a companies that manage the IT infrastructure and systems of their clients. And so he came to me with this problem and he said, I have this issue. I have an amazing company. The team is amazing. Our operations and our processes are really strong. Our customers are loyal, but we haven't been able to generate sustained revenue growth in about five or six years. And so I started working with them. I took over sales. I took over marketing. And during that time, we grew the company 40 percent in annualized MRR. We had double digit EBITDA growth, and we eventually sold the company two years later. And an estimated 50 percent increase in valuation. And that is basically how I got into technology, how I became a CRO, which had been a lot a long term goal of mine and how I wound up founding my own company. So at this point I'm running Amplify GTM. We help companies do exactly that to identify and implement the fastest, most sustainable paths to sustained revenue growth.

Speaker 2 2:39

One, what a fascinating journey, and I always say luck is where chance meets opportunity but I have two questions, actually, because it's interesting. You said your goal was to be a CRO, which is a relatively new title, and there's a lot of controversy lately about this title and what it means. What does it mean to you?

Speaker 6 3:00

That's funny because I don't, I'm not sure exactly what part of the controversy you're referring to, but I've always been very passionate about this because the way I look at it, I want to deliver results. I want to be responsible for money in the door. That to me is a role that has a defined and important seat at the table. And that was always my goal. My goal was to have a seat at the table where key decisions are made. And so the way I look at it is I actually consider chief revenue officer a critical role because the entire front end of your business. Needs to be working together. And I believe that a true chief revenue officer is in charge of outside sales, inside sales and marketing. And the reason for that is if you want a company that's achieving a lot of the growth rates that companies are looking to achieve today, especially the, a lot of the ones that I work with that are private equity backed, they're looking for 15 percent category growth, 20 percent category growth organically. A lot of the times you need to have that entire ecosystem. working together. And the other thing that's important about that too is if you're looking at it, it's also the piece at which you want to generate growth. If you're looking at short term growth you definitely want to look at mining your current customer base. If you have the ability for the long term growth, that's where you're going to build more of that long term ecosystem, which to really get up and running, depending on where your starting point is a nine to 12 month process. So whenever I look at that role, I want, purview over all three of those things because it gives me the best chance at achieving the goals.

Speaker 2 4:38

You hit on one part of the controversy, which is the CRO. If people truly understand what a chief revenue officer is, it's not a glorified VP of sales. It's that owning the marketing part. It's the whole value chain of acquiring, retaining, growing, and keeping the customer healthy and happy or the revenue healthy and the customer happy. It's the whole value chain. So that's part one. The second says, oh they'll promote someone to a CRO, but yet they don't give them. The marketing and the customer success, right? It really has. I think the second controversy, which I'm very heated about actually is the marketing, like a marketing per a person who's went only at marketing, who never carried the bag. There's this discussion of how they should like, Oh, they'll be much better in the CRO role. And I'm like, No way, Jose. Absolutely not. If you have not been told no 90 percent of the time when you picked up the phone or emails unanswered or gone eight months trying to sell an enterprise deal, in the seven figures only to have you lose to a competitor at the last minute. If you have not suffered that, there's no way you could be a CRO. One, because the sales side, which is a huge part of it, isn't going to respect you. Um, but to you, it's, I find like sales is the most misunderstood in terms of what you go through every single day. And unless you understand, because you walked the walk, it's a hard thing to go manage and upskill and coach and like collaborate and deal storm with the revenue acquirers.

Speaker 6 6:20

Yes. And you can have the best marketing out there. And this is the part. So I originally wanted to be a CMO. And I thought to myself, my gosh, when I reached that is the ultimate for me. And then I realized that I owned a certain part of that revenue process. And then my ownership was gone and everything that happened between when that was handed to sales and when money got in the door was outside of my control so I could generate thousands of MQL and you can argue the quality of those at any given time and what qualifies as an MQL. That's another controversy that and a challenge that I see a lot. But if you don't have, if you're not able to control what happens from there. The marketing is useless. It's that unless it actually converts and gets money in the door. It's a lot of hullabaloo for nothing. And so the other thing about sales, and I couldn't agree more with your point of view on sales. Sales is about doing the hard work. Day in and day out. And this is something that I say especially if in your, if you're in sales, you've got to take the view of a running back, not a wide receiver. The running back is getting the ball multiple times. They're going for inches and a couple of feet. The wide receiver is getting the ball one once or twice, and they're going for the big play. And so a salesperson has to go in and do the hard work every single day in and day out. The other thing that I say is, I've done sales. I've done marketing. I've done customer success. I've led all of those teams. I'm a horrible salesperson. I don't like to sell. I find it uncomfortable. But I'm a great consultant. And so the thing that I I'll tell my sales teams, two different things. The first thing is never sell consult. So I want you, talking to that customer, understanding their pain points and challenges, and then thinking about how we can address those pains, points and challenges. That's your number one job. You do that well, you're going to make the sale eventually. And the other thing I tell them is team of sharks always swimming. And people who've worked with me will literally say, yeah, she does say that because It's you have to go in, you do something good that day. What's the next thing that you have to do, because it's a relentless job of doing the right activities day in and day out.

Speaker 2 8:41

Oh, it's, I always used to tell, I would tell my sales team, two things. One there's no such thing as hope in, in, in every, anywhere in my business. There's no hope is for losers. And what is what'd you do for me today? I hate to say it, it's but, you never, a really great salesperson doesn't sit on what they did last week or last month. It's, they know that if, even if I sold a million dollars last month, like I got to keep doing it. Like it's consistency and, the perseverance and the grit. And it's the leading activities.

Speaker 6 9:14

It's making sure, okay, you close the sale, but then are you doing the leading activities so that you're closing the next sale in a week or a month or whatever it is from now. The people who are really good at it have a combination of being very good with people in that consultative sale, having the acumen on the product. And then the discipline and the determination to do those activities on a daily basis. So when you see someone like a salesperson who's killing it, they're bringing those three things to the table and they are not easy to do to combine into one person.

Speaker 2 9:45

And I'm going to actually disagree that You're a terrible salesperson because actually you're a great salesperson. You're a great consultant but you're also a great networker and we're going to talk about networking later, but it's in two ways. One is in a topic that you and I are both very passionate about, which is. Customer centricity but also the idea, how community plays into that and building and networking. So let's move into a topic that you and I are going to be talking about on June 18th at the Yale club in New York city, which is becoming customer obsessed in times of accelerated change. And. There is a caveat to that of how we're looking at it is because we like to double down on complexity over here at H2K Labs, which is the multi sided business model. And there are many definitions of a multi sided business model and I have mine, but I'd like to hear what in your, when I say that, what does it mean to you?

Speaker 6 10:43

It's funny because when we were talking about doing this before I started really thinking about it and thinking about what does it mean to me today, and it's really difficult for me, for example, to come up with a linear business model on this day and age. If you're a company and you've got Any type of channel strategy or partnership strategy. You basically that's of any significance. You basically have a multi sided business model. So I I think of the days where linear business models were present, so you are, let's say you're a manufacturing company and you make a product and you sell that product directly to the customer. Like we look back at that now and it's Oh man, if that was all we had to manage, that's doable. It's yeah I'm up for that. But very few, if any companies, you'll probably come up with an example that I haven't thought of, but very few companies operate like that anymore. If they're of any size, basically. Any company that has, let's say a director of channel partnerships and above you're multi sided. So that means that you are dealing with two separate and distinct user groups, if not more than that, and that you have to interconnect and provide value to each of those user groups in order to generate. The overall sustained success of the organization. So an example would be, let's take like I was talking before about it managed service providers. You've got your vendor partners and you've got your customers. And basically what you're serving as is a conduit between those two. You're taking the vendors. software and their technology and you're putting it together in the right way to protect that customer's business or to make that customer's business more efficient to enhance communication but you don't have the luxury of just servicing the customer. Or just dealing with the vendor. You have to be able to go between both of those communities and bring them together in a way that delivers increased and enhanced value.

Speaker 2 12:53

And I agree. And actually, I just Was like, we need a scale of multi sided like a heat map of cause that was a good example. Because you have to have a different go to market strategy to get those vendors in your partners. You have to serve them. They have to have their own marketing materials. They have their own sales ecosystem because they are critical and important to your revenue. But you also on the flip side still have, if many people, many companies have both a channel and a direct strategy, you have a sales team and marketing for them, that's, there's a lot of data and complexity and systems being used there. The difference between that level of multi sided and I agree, it's a hundred percent multi sided and where I go often in my sandbox, which is events and media and digital information is that. There's no concrete products being sold, like software or manufacturing parts, okay? And the audience side the buyer seller, the audience side has a very different need, which is information and decision support tools to help me do my job better, faster, with less risk, make me smarter help me save money, help me understand what to buy from a software technology standpoint with, and I can't make a mistake because my job depends on it type of content and tools. That's a huge product right there. And it's delivered across all of these different channels, right? Websites, events, social media, video podcasts to the other side of the fence, which are the suppliers who want to reach those audience members. They want to make sure they're. Yes. They want to know that the content and the tools and everything is relevant, but they're assuming you're doing that. If you have the right audience, they want to get to the audience and you have to create this symbiotic journey for both where the buy side doesn't feel overwhelmed by the sell side and the sell side doesn't feel underwhelmed by the buy side. So it's serving both these segments, creating a solution set for each of them, tracking the engagement on each of them, which is different. And somehow they meet in the middle and understanding how that part works. It's to me, that's really complex. That really lends itself to a huge amount of complexity when it comes to customer centricity.

Speaker 6 15:21

Yes. It's funny because as we're talking about the complexity, I wrote down as you were speaking better, faster, less risk. So when you were talking about what you're looking to deliver in your industry, that the ultimate goal is to help these businesses operate better, faster, less risk, take something like it completely different industry. The ultimate goal is. Exactly the same. And when you talked about the executives want to make sure that they're not making a mistake, that's exactly the same over in a completely separate industry. So what it made me think about is we're talking about a lot of complexity in order to deliver a very Simple, or seemingly simple outcome, which is running the business well, and that, that carries across very different industries, but I look at even as we're thinking about things like these vendor partners, for example, like if you want to be a prominent person in their portfolio, because you want to do. Co marketing with them. A lot of times a way to grow a company, like if I'm putting together a marketing program, I'm always looking at inbound marketing. I'm looking at field marketing, which is basically events. And I'm looking at partnerships. One of the key ways to scale growth is by having partnerships. And so that's another way. So You're looking to bring in these partners or these vendor partners who are not only going to, you're not only going to take their service and now apply it to your customers, but they're also going to serve as lead generators. And sometimes you might do things where you start to white label products and all that type of thing. And that is all by being a prominent player in the industry, not only with your customers, but also with the other players that are there.

Speaker 2 17:10

Okay. Let's go to the next question then. Now that we've. We've had this really awesome, broad definition of multi sided, and it sounds like most businesses are if they're healthy and growing and scaling. And that is the alignment of revenue critical roles, right? In the business. And we touched a little bit upon it when we were talking about the role of the CRO, but in your mind, when you're running your GTM strategy for clients and you go and walk in. What is the first thing you do when you look at the organization?

Speaker 6 17:45

Ideally, the first thing that I do is I do an overall assessment. So one of the things that people will ask me is what do you do? And I tell them it's Different every single time. So when I go into an organization and I'm evaluating, okay, what is it that you're doing and what is it that you should be doing more of less of or, stop or start, I go into the organization and I ask a bunch of questions. And what I'm looking for is actually not, I'm less focused on, okay, stop doing this, although that will come, but I'm more looking for what I call like the nuggets of gold. Every organization has hidden strengths and opportunities that they're doing really well. And a lot of times the best thing that you can do to enhance your revenue growth is to look at your own organization, what is working well, and then double down on it. So one of the first things that I'll do is. Go back to strategy. So people will come to me and they'll be like we're not generating. And there's a variety of issues. We're not generating enough leads. The leads aren't converting through the funnel. I can't hire a salesperson who sells as successfully as I do. That's usually what, like a founder issue we can't figure out marketing. And so what happens is they'll come and it's a tactical issue, but actually their issue is five steps back. In terms of strategy. So if I had a dime a dozen for every person who came to me and where sales has one idea of who the ideal customer is, like we call it the ICP, the ideal customer profile and marketing has a different idea of who the ideal customer is. So this is a really good one. I spoke to one company and They were talking about how they're going after enterprise prospects. So this means these are, this is whale hunting, you've got a long sales cycle, you've got a, like an account based strategy because there's only so many of them, that type of a thing. And then they also mentioned that marketing was delivering hundreds of MQLs per month against which they weren't able to convert, because I can tell you right now, if you're generating, in the high hundreds of MQLs, they're not enterprise MQLs. There's just not enough of them out there. So what happened was you literally had sales, he was going after one customer and this almost seems like it seems crazy, right? Like when we look at it conceptually, but the thing is you get busy and running the business. If there's not good communication between the departments. So the sales is going after one customer and marketing is going after a completely different customer. And then you think about. The inequity between those two and the waste of time and resources and money that's happening in that funnel. And so one of the first things that I'll do is I'll do the assessment. I'll ask the list of questions. I'll hear where the pain points and challenges are. And then I back it up and I say, we have to all agree on strategy. Who are we going after? Who is the right customer to bring in and then getting really focused on that. I don't want to have, if you're looking at your ideal customer profile, you want to identify maybe three industry verticals. If you're going to have a vertical based strategy and you want to go after those really heavy because you want to speak to them being customer centric. You want to speak to them in their language. And then, oh, by the way, when you're able to go to really define that and go after them it gives you, you're bringing in customers who are most likely to benefit her. They're most likely to convert. Because your messaging resonates, they're also going to benefit from your product or service because they they have the need that's there. And then therefore, they're most likely to be satisfied and stay loyal and deliver that lifetime customer value. Yeah, able to standardize products and services because you're bringing in more of the same that drives operational efficiency and we all know operational efficiency drives profitability. So you back up and it's you talk to someone and you're like we need to define the ideal customer profile and they're like, Oh, y'all like marketing crap, but it's not. It's actually really important because you get that right and you can build a business behind it. That's literally more profitable than the competition. You know, it's interesting. The media and events world one sales to me has always taken a backseat to audience in terms of the effort, the investments, the technology, and the quote unquote seat at the table. they need the revenue. They're, it's a revenue led organization, but in terms of the budget and the support and the thought process behind the strategy, it's been like, all right, then we look it's going to keep it going. Let's not mess around and change stuff. The SaaS model where it's get the users.

Speaker 2 22:42

But really what, if you really were to go lift the hood up, you would find a lot of unhealthy revenue, which is there's high levels of churn. They're like, Oh, we've got 65, 70 percent retention. You're like, and they're happy about it. And you're sitting there going, Oh my God, why are you happy about that? And the second part is it's revenue at any cost. And there are different levels of profitability and scalability and sustainability and the different types of revenue streams that they have. I was just talking about this yesterday with a very well known CRO in a very large data and media company. And it's yeah, the sales team comes in and they're all excited because they sold a half a million dollars of a custom project. I'm sitting here ready to bang my head against the wall going, Oh my God, that is, Not renewable has a high rate of failure or delay. So we may not even get the revenue all in this because our fiscal is July 1 and the cost to implement it. What's the margin? But the sales person's happy because they got the deal in and they hit credit. Quota and they have the commission. The client is probably happy actually to a degree because they're getting this custom project, but it's not good for the business. And that is, that's where strategy has failed. It has failed on incentives. It has failed on educating the salesperson. It's failed for the company to be even offering unprofitable solutions, especially if you're struggling to grow. And a lot of these companies are seeing maybe 20 percent EBITDA. It's been, hard times. So I think there's a lot on the efficiency side that can be brought over to, many of the markets that I serve on the media and event side. But again, I think overall, it's like we need to be selling smarter, more efficiently and more profitably It's all about that,

Speaker 6 24:34

that efficient funnel that you were talking about. Oh,

Speaker 2 24:37

right. And I, I think I told you, I trademarked this concept called the revenue room. And it was because I actually was consulting for a company that had a revenue room. And it was a literal room where they had marketing. They had the marketing team who was feeding them the leads, right? They were, they're responsible for the inbound leads. You had the SDR team that would take the leads. Go qualify them for appointments, the AEs were there doing all of the closing and the, the sailing and the closing and the customer success team is also in there, They would have them organized in pods. Sales squads. So focused on specific ICPs. And I thought it was brilliant. They weren't arguing with one another about whose fault it was if pipeline wasn't hit, it's because they were all aligned. They were listening to one another. They were literally teaming up from the beginning. The act was, how did we acquire all the way to closing, retaining and growing who they ended up fighting with a lot though, was the audience and the content side, because they were not in the But they were delivering the

Speaker 6 25:39

one entity that wasn't in the room is the one that had the and they're the ones that are in the communication and culture. Right?

Speaker 2 25:46

It's the alignment. It's the customer centricity organizational alignment. Like product needs a seat within that revenue construct and frankly financed us too. Do you, your position I would imagine is that because I actually worked for a sales company where the the customer success team was under product, not under the CRO. I always found that really strange, but I hear it's not. Maybe it's changed today. This was a couple years ago. What's your position on that?

Speaker 6 26:18

And whether they should be under product or CRO. I mean, if you're at an organization that's big enough, you may have a chief client officer who's going directly into the CEO. So taking that out of it because that, that makes sense. Large organizations, each role becomes more specialized. In most companies, I struggle with the product thing. I'm trying to figure out how that would work. I'm honestly trying to think of a scenario in which that would make sense. And I'm not coming up with one to me. When I look at it and I've got a company and let's say we have to build the marketing model, the first place I'm going to go is actually customer success, it's my greatest opportunity for short term revenue growth. You've got an existing audience. Who, is where you have an existing relationship, assuming you've got a good service delivery organization, you are able to just tack stuff on to current conversations. So the way I always look at it is I say, current customer revenue is going to drive your short to midterm revenue growth. And then you've got your marketing, which if, unless you're taking it, just amping something up, that's already working well, if you're building something that's going to take your six to 12 months. So you've got short term revenue growth. You've got the inbound marketing, which is going to be your mid to long term revenue growth. And you've got to have the combination of the two in order to really drive those 15, 20, 25 percent category growth rates.

Speaker 2 27:54

Yeah. I have two things. I think one customer success is the unsung hero because they are so close to the customer and marketing. The top of funnel should be connected with them all the time. What are the customers saying? What's the feedback? What are they like? What do they don't like? Yeah. What are the themes that you're hearing that we could apply to the marketing to do our marketing better? But you actually said something really interesting and it may answer a question I've been grappling with. So you said customer success and then you said service delivery. Is that a different role?

Speaker 6 28:25

It depends on the size of the organization. But in my mind, so like I know of companies where there's, that's actually three different roles. So you've got the people who are So I'm going to actually I'm going to give an example company that I was working with. They had account managers, so they had the operations people who were doing more service delivery. So I'm actually implementing what it is on a day to day basis. Then you've got the account manager. Who was managing the overall health of the account. They weren't necessarily servicing the account on that, like implementing things on a day to day basis, but they were managing the account. Now in this organization, they wanted the account managers focused on management. They didn't want the account managers cross selling and upselling. And as we just talked about that cross sell and upsell is a key opportunity for revenue growth, especially in the short to midterm. When I was actually working with them and they were looking at, okay, why aren't we growing? One of the issues they weren't maximizing current customer growth. So what we did is rather than retrain the account management team in this particular instance, because it just wasn't in their DNA. We added the client development team and that client development team would partner with the account managers when there were the opportunities, when there was, we identified white space for cross and upsell. I think it's relatively fluid because there are instances where I would have gone where I would go in there and I would look at an account management team and there's actually an instance now where I'm working with an account management team and I would say we can have them cross an upsell. There's no reason why To hire and train a whole separate group of people on top of your account managers. We can drive enough growth with your current team and that's going to be more profitable. But then there's other times where you look at it and you look at that team and it's okay, that's going to be an overhaul. And so you might have someone who's going to come in like a few client development managers in order to partner with them and drive it that way. So I'd say there's, Multiple approaches, all of which are valid. And it depends on where your organization is and the size of your organization and where you are operationally and from a maturity standpoint at any point in time.

Speaker 2 30:46

And it sounds good. Cause to me, the account manager with the delivery and then a The cross all upsell team that you said sounds like overkill, but I'm thinking to myself, maybe it's because what's being sold has such a high level of project management in it. And having to connect a lot of different things to get the project done or the deal done or To the contract executed that account manager is only focused on that goes to the customer delivery team or the service delivery team to X who executes. They don't face the customer really, even though they're they are touching it at the end of the day, you brought in the this upsell cross healthy. Why wouldn't you go back to the new business developers to actually do the cross sell upsell?

Speaker 6 31:34

I like to keep new business developers developing new business, so I want salespeople to be hunters. The fact is that existing customer audience is always going to be a richer audience. Shouldn't say that, but it's always going to be a less uphill battle, because like we said, they're already engaged. Assuming that you're servicing them well, you know that there's interest there, and so you're just saying hey. We should be doing what we are doing for you. And this, which by the way, I know for a fact you don't have, and I know how it's going to benefit, hunters is a completely different thing. And what I found is that when you have salespeople who are both hunting and farming, they spend too much time farming and not enough time hunting. Also the comp between those two needs to be different. You can't be making the same amount of calm on a current customer as you are on. And that new prospect. So if possible. I like to separate those two. I do have things where if it's a really large account, you might have an exception where the outside salesperson may stay involved with it for a longer period of time than usual. So there's always exceptions to the rule, but if possible, hunters hunt farmers farm.

Speaker 2 32:44

Yeah. I also will say, I think it also depends on again, if you're selling enterprise and your expansion opportunity is enormous. So like we used to sell into SAP. You would never want to have multiple people. You needed someone to own SAP and inside and out across the board, you might have a partner in another region who, you know, because, you want it to be regional and local and I think the other part is if you're in more mature markets where the new business, which no one will ever admit, but. It's a little bit harder to get. You would have a problem with the sales team, but I agree the comp wouldn't be enough for them to hunt

Speaker 6 33:22

in order to, and that's my point. Why I was saying like, everything has to start with an assessment because there is no one size fits all rule to anything like and it's the way that I always go into things. I always say revenue growth is a combination of art and science And I should say, and that's even more so for profitable revenue growth. So it's going to be a combination. I always feel that it's a combination of data and gut feel. I think you have to be able to bring both to the table and it's why you hire people who are experienced or just who have a good sense of the customer and that type of a thing. I think that the best companies combine both.

Speaker 2 34:02

No, absolutely. I would say art, skill and science and well, data. But yeah, we're on the same page, which leads me into my next question, which is data. Tell me how you help companies understand and activate data as fuel for revenue growth and, revenue growth, acquisition, retention, expansion.

Speaker 6 34:28

So this is such a, it's such a big one, right? And it's a place where I feel like a lot of companies struggle. So the thing that I say is I have never, I've written gosh, so many annual marketing plans. I started doing it in my twenties, back at consumer packaged goods companies. And I've been doing it throughout my career. I've I have never executed a go to market plan exactly the way I've written it ever. And actually that's a good thing because the way that I look at it is you write a go to market plan based upon the information you have at hand at that point in time. And I don't know of any of us who's operating in an industry that doesn't. evolve where customer needs don't evolve or where the competition doesn't evolve. So the way I look at it is you write this plan, you have this overall strategy of how it is that you're going to go to market. And then you have to look at it like the same way I consider a website. It's a living, breathing entity that continuously needs to be monitored and evolved. And so one of the key things on that plan is you have to have. Places where you're getting data and ideally customer centric data. So looking at things like feedback loops, looking at things like scorecards and then also having the accountability in the processes to make sure that those aren't just things that are out there, that they're actually being used, analyzed and you're changing how you're doing things based upon the information. That they're delivering. And that last part, actually, I shouldn't say that every aspect of that can be challenging. Getting the data, figuring out what data you want, getting the data into scorecards that are manageable and that's accurate. And then also, and that in and of itself is often challenging. And I know you have some really good insights there, but so then you've got that part that's challenging and you actually want that to be the least. Of your worries because you want to spend the majority of your time not figuring out is this data, right? And how do we gather this data, but actioning the data and saying, what is this? What is this data telling us what is going well that we want to do more of what is not going well, because then we want to move resources away from it. That should be ideally 75 percent of your time. So it should be like 25 percent and getting the data and making sure the data is right. 75 percent on actioning the data. And a lot of times I find that organizations, it's really difficult for them to reach that, that it's reversed. They're still in the get the data is the data right type of a thing versus the actioning portion.

Speaker 2 37:09

Yeah for sure. And I think with a multi sided business model, and especially if you're dealing with lots of different ICP's for different types of products you're selling, the data is overwhelming. And so I, technically, if it's a well set up Customer centric organization that had understands that there should be no time spent on getting the data. The data should be set up and flowing into dashboards and to score cards and to, but there's a big problem, so that's a problem understanding the right data to look at because not all data is good, right? It's There's just what's the right data for now? How is it being democratized across your revenue organization? So we're all looking at the same thing, but maybe in slightly different ways. And I hear this one a lot. Yeah, I've got a lot of data in front of me, but no one's been training me or teaching me how to action it. So all, that's why CEOs get so frustrated with the cost of data transformation and data projects because they're, it's expensive. But then they're like where's the ROI? What were you expecting? So you, Mr. CEO or Mrs. CEO or CEO of any label what were you expecting? That's your big loss there. What were you expecting data to do to your top and bottom line? And how did you get your team all aligned about that? What were the milestones and how are you using data? But let's bring it down to the revenue room is, are you training and coaching? All of you, every function to have a business level data science skillset. What am I looking at? What is it telling me? What do I do with it next? And what are the tools have I been given to actually action this into my workflow? And then how are we measuring? That

Speaker 4 38:55

yes,

Speaker 2 38:56

measuring the actioning. So I know it's working. That's the flow that needs to be present across the board. And that's when you have that going all of a sudden, you can align your revenue critical roles. You can put KPIs on every single function in the business that touches the customer. On revenue, it may be slightly different. And I'm not saying get rid of the KPIs that are about the skills within your function, but if you wanna scale and grow your company and get everyone working on the same thing, they have to be looking at the same data. They have to be aligned and being incentivized, and they have to know and be given the tools to action it so that they can mitigate risk and capture opportunity faster and better.

Speaker 6 39:40

Yes. And a lot of times it's also having the communication processes around that. Yes. Getting the right data, interpreting it, changing your actions because of it, and making sure the right people are in the room as you're doing each of those things. Yes. Like we were talking about we're marketing, we're saying I'm delivering hundreds of MQLs a month, and sales is convert any of them. So it's they both, they're like I'm meeting my KPI. Yeah. And, but it's not doing business and good.

Speaker 2 40:10

And then, again, this is the proverbial problem in events and media, the KPIs for an event for the audience side is butts in seat. How many people did we get in the room? And they hit their KPI. And oh, by the way, the NPS score for the audience was really high. Yay, we did our job. The sales side hit their quota. But guess what? All of the customers are PO'd because the audience, all those numbers, didn't hit the quality levels they were expecting. They didn't get meetings. They didn't get enough leads. And then you're sitting there, but audience is saying, hey, I got, I hit my thing. My job. Too bad. There's that's the misalignment and that's not customer centric.

Speaker 6 40:49

Yeah. That's a big thing. I it's such a common, it's another reason why I'm big on zeros because, marketing and be like sales doesn't convert. And sales is always marketing doesn't give us enough leads. And in my teams, I don't ever want to hear either of those phrases. It's one combined team. And, if any of those things is happening, or you have an issue with that's exactly why I'm there. I'm there to help facilitate and solve those issues or to guide the solution, the team solution to those issues.

Speaker 2 41:20

Yeah unfortunately, we're running out of time. So I think we have to schedule another podcast because there are two more questions on here. I feel like yeah, we can keep

Speaker 6 41:26

talking for a long time.

Speaker 2 41:28

But let's say next episode, we're going to be talking about community and how important that is not only from a media standpoint, but actually, if you are a technology vendor, for example. Listen, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure having you on our the revenue room show. And I'm looking forward to our next not only our next podcast, but on June 18th, you and I are going to be Co lecturers at our first lunch lab, which will be taking place at the Yale Club on June 18th from 12 to 4. And we are going to take a deep dive into customer centricity in a multi sided business environment. And that deep dive is not only a new construct we've built, which is rapid learning for CEOs and their customers, Revenue critical executive teams. But it is going to include the eight capabilities of customer centric organizations and a flywheel structure to go through that from beginner, medium, and advanced. And then I call it advanced plus, which is multi sided considerations. We're going to talk about the six principles that guide leaders to move towards customer centricity. And we're also actually going to talk about the. Unspoken problem with customer centricity. And those are the risks to the business if you don't do it right. So looking forward to having you with me on the 18th of June.

Speaker 6 42:46

Thank you so much. It was wonderful to be a guest in the revenue room and definitely looking forward to the 18th. We'll I think we're going to do some great things with that group in person. Terrific. Thanks so much, Amy. Thank you. Take care

Heather Holst-Knudsen 43:00

You can find us@2klabs.com. Thank you.

43:03

Thank you for listening to The Revenue Room by H2K Labs. Subscribe to our channel today.