Process then Scale: Maricela McKenzie on Operational Clarity Over Growth Hype

Most companies think they have a growth problem. This week's guest says they actually have an operational clarity problem.

Host Jason talks with Maricela "Marcy" McKenzie, CEO and founder of Clarida Strategies, about how clean-tech and EV startups move from founder-led momentum to repeatable, scalable execution. With a career spanning oil & gas, SolarCity/Tesla, EVBox, Rivian's Waypoints team, and ChargerHelp, Marcy has seen exactly where growth breaks down — and it's rarely a lack of good ideas.

In this conversation:

• Why "the founder cannot continue to be the operating system of the company"
• The difference between a real pipeline and the illusion of one
• The hidden costs of scaling without systems — and how you burn capital quietly
• Using your CRM as a system of truth, not a filing cabinet
• How buyers actually buy vs. how you wish they would
• Where AI genuinely helps go-to-market — and where it's just noise
• A look inside Marcy's SCALE framework: Survey, Clarify, Architect, Launch, Enhance

Whether you're a founder, sales leader, or operator, you'll walk away with a sharper sense of how to build capability instead of chaos.

Field Frequency is powered by FieldAdvantage, specialists in the maintenance and operation of critical infrastructure, including EV charging networks. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

A lot of companies think they have a growth problem. What they actually have is an operational clarity problem. In this episode of Field Frequency, I'm joined by Marticella McKenzie from Clarita Strategies. We get into something most companies avoid talking about, that is until the wheels start falling off. We talk about messy sales systems, undefined customer journeys, CRM theater, and founder-led momentum that doesn't always scale. We talk about why busyness can get mistaken for traction, why teams can sort through go-to-market noise and still not land anywhere, and why discipline in operations is what determines company growth or capital burn. This is not a conversation about sales hacks or growth tricks. It's a conversation about building systems that scale. Let's get into it. How are you doing, Maricela?

SPEAKER_01 1:10

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, Jason.

SPEAKER_00 1:12

All right. My Texas accent. So mentally I want to pronounce your first name with a Spanish kind of slant to it. But my Texas accent is a barrier. So I think for this uh episode, I'm gonna refer to you by Marcy, if that's okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:25

I also go by Marcy, so Yeah, I knew that.

SPEAKER_00 1:28

I knew that. So I uh I'm gonna I'm going to leverage that. Well, Marcy, thanks for coming on Field Frequency. And I want to kick off our conversation with your professional journey, your background, if you could share that with us and then talk about the thesis around Clarita strategies and what, you know, what was the catalyst? What uh, you know, what led to you launching that firm?

SPEAKER_01 1:47

Yeah, absolutely. Um I like to say that I've been in energy my entire career, you know, you know, and and every move I've made in my career has really somehow been logical or connected, even though maybe at the time I didn't think it was, but um when I talked through it, I realized, oh yeah, that was uh very it was very um, you know, it just made a a lot of logical sense. So started in oil and gas. I I led sales teams selling fuel, uh fleet fueling, lubricants and and all of the such to to fleets. And uh that was really my first, it was actually my first foray into implementing CRN, uh, which was really cool. It was the first opportunity for me to look at it, doesn't just take a good salesperson to do sales, it takes some process, it takes some, you know, organization, it takes, you know, some some diligence. And so that that was great. Um, it was really, you know, process create plus talent create success. So that's um that's where one of the things I learned there. The other was really getting to know your client. How important is it to know your client? And so working with fleets, it was so important to dig into what makes them successful, what are the challenges they have, you know, at the time there were, and there still are, from what I understand, uh driver shortages, fuel costs, routing implications, all those different things. So it's really important to know what really challenges your client and um how you're going to be empathetic about it and how you sell to them based on that. From there, I made the logical move to trucking and transloading. So uh I was working with an organization that was that was hauling from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. And it was during a time when the ports were requiring a transition into cleaner diesel and cleaner fuels. And so looking back, it's like foreshadowing to this evolution of transportation, which is, you know, super exciting. And then I was working in, you know, distribution and transportation of uh of frack pipe and large diametal gas transmission pipe and everything. And so it was like staying in that oil slash transportation world up until the point where we had a we had California, Southern California had a massive gas leak. And I asked myself this question is this, is this where I want to participate in, you know, in my my line of work? What do I want to do? And do I want to go into clean energy? And so of course I answered that question. Yes, I do want to do this. And that's how I found myself over at Solar City, ultimately Tesla, where I led sales teams, residential solar sales teams out in the field and then eventually moved into the showrooms and trained teams on how to sell the entire ecosystem. So uh, you know, sell more cars if you sell if you can teach them about uh charging in their garage and power walls and solar and all of you know everything. So that was a really great experience. I loved yeah, I love working at Tesla. The the intense, it was run with this intensity of a startup. I mean, it it truly still was a startup, even though it had been established for a while. And I think that was my first, you know, we gotta run and we never stop running. It is going fast all of the time, but all the time having some sort of process and plan to go with it. So one of the reasons why I left Tesla, though, was when we didn't sell a vehicle, it might have been in some cases, it was because clients were very, very skeptical about charging. They they said, I don't understand charging. I know it sounds you're making it sound easy. It sounds like Tesla makes it easy, but somehow it's just very foreign to me and it sounds very complicated. And, you know, looking at how Tesla has created a vertical infrastructure, they have made it super easy. But the industry as a whole has made it really difficult and complicated. You know, there are all kinds of LinkedIn posts about how tough we've made it for ourselves. But nevertheless, at that point in time, I said, I've got to go into EV charging and I started working with Eeve Box. And this is when they, you know, were making their entry into North America and it was a great time to be there. And we were doing a lot of, you know, destination charging and um, you know, charging at malls and all kinds of places where people would park and you know, be there for a few hours and um, you know, hotels and things like that. So really great. And then COVID hit it kind of slowed things down. You know, you've got people aren't going to work, they're working from home, you've got people aren't going out and doing fun things, they're not shopping at malls, they want to stay away from everyone, they're ordering their groceries online. So that kind of slowed down a bit. But I feel like the, you know, the EVs were were EVs were moving forward. Everything was still moving ahead. And so I was really pleased to get the call from Rivian and say, hey, we'd like you to come and work for us. And so I was, you know, was super excited to work with the energy and charging team there for waypoints. Uh, I ran their sales sales enablement, and that was one of the places where I was able to say, okay, we've got we've got a line process and enablement, you know, marketing, all of the different pieces to try to get to this end sale. And so it was really fun. I really enjoyed working with the team there. I met you there, and uh it was a it was a great place to be. While I was there, and also while I was at EV Box, in both instances, we were working on deploying charging, and so were so many other companies. It was all about let's get as many chargers out there. We've got to put, you know, mass installations and less time and energy and money was put into how do we make sure that these chargers work when they're in the field? Who's gonna go fix them? How quickly can we take care of all this? And so the logical transition from that point was to work as SVP of sales over at Charger Help. So that was, and really Charger Help is where I think the the the my Clarita scale program is really where it was born. So it's kind of where I I took everything I've been doing at all of these other organizations and realized there were so many pieces to it, and all of them are important. And so that's where I started to kind of put it together. And and I started Clarita Strategies because of because I started to see, you know, there's so many startup companies in clean tech, in sustainability. A lot of them don't make it. Some of the time it is, a lot of the time it is because they can't operationalize and commercialize commercialize their product or their service. And so it's not for lack of great ideas, it's not for lack of very intelligent solutions, and it's not for a lack of, you know, very brilliant founders and leaders. Uh it's just a matter of putting all of those things together and then creating processes and operationalizing the ability for a company to scale. And so I said, I've got this tool, I've got all of the different bits and pieces that I've tested along the way in different organizations. And now I've created this structure and I want to offer it to companies to really help them, you know, create a repeatable sales process and and scale their businesses and really, you know, help us make some headway into, you know, this challenge that we have with climate change.

SPEAKER_00 8:44

You just by nature, by virtue of your the the progress of your professional journey, it would make sense that you would be picking up tools and experience and knowledge and compiling that for and and that being the catalyst for Clarita, that makes uh makes a lot of sense. And we've talked about this offline before, how we have a similar trajectory in that we both started in oil gas. You were a little bit further upstream, I was a little bit further downstream, but uh interesting that you know we both made it over to e-mobility from from oil and gas. And and like you say, when you look at your path, it does make sense. And I've said it before, and it's probably a common saying, history doesn't always rhyme, but it doesn't always repeat, but it does rhyme, and there's the there's a clear trajectory to what you've what you've done. And and you know, you look at eB Box, uh, a manufacturer, of course, I believe they they went out of business, right?

SPEAKER_01 9:33

And then of course, they're out of business in North America in the U.S. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:38

Yeah. We um Field Advantage in EB Box were in in conversation while they you know before the change uh in the U.S. business were looking at uh supporting their hardware. But uh, you know, to to your point of where your experiences and where you've what you've gathered along the way and the processes and places. We both were part of the Waypoints team over at Rivy, and we saw you know the changes and shifts and pivots all within the Waypoint team over there during that time. It was like you say, it was it was fun. I had fun. It was an enjoyable time, but it was um it was a fast time and different, probably type of fast than what you experienced over at Tesla, but still fast nonetheless. So um I would like I would like to explore a little bit more about uh Clarita and and understand you talked about the patterns that you were seeing that led up to building it, and and you developed a product called Scale Framework. I'm gonna talk about that. Uh, but I would also like to get into the strategy versus operational reality. A lot of companies think that they have a growth problem, and and we've talked about this offline and and I think it's an important conversation for the audience. A lot of companies think they have a growth problem when they actually have an operational clarity problem. The importance of your name there, the name of the firm. From your vantage point, where do businesses commonly confuse activity, activity with actual go-to-market effectiveness?

SPEAKER_01 10:57

Yeah, no, that's a that's that's a great way to look at it. That that is it. Um a lot of times they're looking at, they're measuring activity, right? Versus outcomes. And so we're doing a lot of things. We're we're posting on LinkedIn, we're uh making a lot of calls, we're going to conferences, we're, you know, doing a lot of marketing campaigns and things, and we're not really, we're not really operationalizing what we're doing. So we're not doing it in in a in a concerted, like with an intentional plan. It's just a sort of a spray and pray approach. And so um, so that that's part of it is is that, you know, we feel like we've got to be doing all the things and we're fed so much information these days. Oh, you should be doing this and you've got to post X number of times per week and you've got to do this, that, and the other. And so everyone's just kind of running and trying to do it all and hoping that something sticks, but they're not always doing it with a plan. And so, you know, you've got people in the in the company that have different approaches that have different messaging, even to the to the level of you know, leadership. You've got salespeople who are doing and saying something, and you've got leadership who's doing something else. And so it creates a bit of um of confusion for clients. And so it really kind of you know points back to messaging. The other thing is weak qualification. So we're talking without having that strategy in place, we're talking to everybody. Uh, we we mistake interest in our company with uh with uh potential with a potential sale, right? Are they really our ideal customer? Do they fit? We don't know how to qualify them. We figure if they want to talk to us, we want to talk to them. And and by all means, I think we should be talking to everyone, but we also have to treat opportunities the right way, right? So we need to know which ones are really moving forward and which ones are our are network conversations. And sometimes these network conversations lead to this illusion that you have a pipeline when you don't. So these are all the things, everything I'm mentioning is this we're we have this illusion of growth because we're having lots of great conversations and we're putting lots of things in in maybe a CRM or depositing information, but we're not really talking to and talking like the ideal customer that we're chasing after, that we really need to chase after. And part of that is because we haven't truly defined it. And so those are some of the challenges. It's you know, we don't get the messaging right because we don't really know who is the ideal customer we should be talking to. Maybe we think we do, but a lot of the work that I do with companies, we I we find that the companies are going after, these are the six or seven different verticals we're going after and and why, right? And so some of the work that we do is take it back to, yeah, let's talk about why. Let's talk about how passionately they are gonna want and need your product or solution, right? If they're not loving it, you're making your sale really, really difficult. If you have to worth their arm, that's a difficult place to be. So really starting with the strategy, getting the the target audience, getting the messaging right, getting the practice, right? Just operational practice of this is how we how we qualify, this is what we do next, this is when we do a a proposal, all of those different things, they matter.

SPEAKER_00 14:11

When you were talking about the activity, the the posting, the networking, the industry events, and all of that busy activity, it we've all lived it and breathed it. We know that busy doesn't always translate to productive busyness. It's sometimes just busyness for busyness' sake. And there's always a potentiality of where it could lead, the conversation that could go somewhere, the opportunity in the networking, and and there is value and we can't neglect it, but but sorting through the noise and identifying where signal is coming from is is is the key. And so that's what I'm hearing. You're saying that you're you're you're wanting to raise I uh you know, I think about the waypoints experience that I had personally, where there was a lot of focus at some point on total addressable market and identifying the ICP. And what I want to do is just get on the phone and just talk to someone and and get get some commercial activity going. Because like you said, people show interest. Rivian's calling, oh, I'm interested, want to talk to Rivian. But how does that translate to commercial activity? How am I using my time the best way for for the company that's going to have some ROI and some value to it and so much, so much noise, so much distractions. And so I I can I can just imagine that as you are um as you're working with with companies, you're trying to move them from you know, move them from that founder-led momentum into repeatable execution. In your consultation, working with your clients, where do organizations typically get stuck in that transition? Where do the wheels start spinning? Is it messaging? Is it systems? What's what does that look like?

SPEAKER_01 15:45

That moment when you're going from founder-led, you know, growth to bringing on teens and trying to try trying to build from there, that's a really, really fragile moment in time. The founder has been carrying everything. They have all the um all the institutional knowledge, the story, the politics, the network, all of these different, you know, the tribal knowledge, right? So they've got everything and they've been successful at it because they've got, you know, they've got their messaging and they've got their process and their connections and all of that. And then we get to a point where, okay, we're ready to scale, we've got to go. And this point, this point where we start to grow, where, hey, you know, we've got funding, let's do it, let's hire a team. And without going and taking that founder knowledge and that founder experience and operationalizing it and creating a process, like taking out the goodness of it and going, how does this fit in a customer journey and a sales process? We we drift, right? So we have just people say all saying different things. We've got some people saying, I'm gonna repeat exactly what the founder says on their calls, right? Or I'm going to do it my way because that's not my voice at all. And it's not just about the voice, it's about the words, the messaging, the whole thing goes off. You can't replicate as much as you want to. You can't replicate that founder of success. You have to, in order to scale, you've got to build a process from it. You've got the intuition piece that the founder had, but you also you've got to create that visibility. How do we take that and make it into something? So, and sometimes at this point, when we start to hit a wall where we say, hey, we're not, we're not producing, we're not getting, you know, getting what we want. The the thought oftentimes is we need more leads. We're obviously not getting more leads, right? We need, we need more of them because if we had more of them, we'd close more and we get more leads and we're still not closing. And so those, you know, that's a real challenge. And so this is the moment where the finger pointing culture kind of starts to come in, where you're going, marketing's not giving us good leads, or they're not giving us enough, or sales isn't closing the leads that we're bringing in, or marketing's messaging is totally off. And it really just kind of comes down to we don't know how we bring value and we have to learn that. And so you have to take a minute, take that that this company's been operating with speed and rushing, and we take we take so much pride in being nimble and going fast. You actually have to take a minute to slow down and say, okay, great, we're proud of the success that we've had so far. And now we need to make it so that we can grow this company with other people.

SPEAKER_02 18:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:21

Additional people. The founder cannot, you know, continue to be the operating system of the of the company.

SPEAKER_00 18:27

Wow. You are dropping so much knowledge here, Marcy. It's your everything you're saying, I'm just it's resonating and and uh it's very um very key to what what I'm hearing you say. I agree with all of it, obviously. It it reminds me of a of a conclave you and I both were recently at where there was a conversation about MQL leads versus SQL and and the difference of perception of those. And of course, when the salesperson's sitting in the chair and they have their myopic view of that lead, and marketing is sitting in their chair, and they have their myopic view of that lead, and it doesn't always align. And yeah, you're right, the the the power and speed and momentum of the founder that has has bootstrapped a organization has got it to a place of of significant growth, but now it's time to move on to the next level. You can't just parrot that. You know, at least the the folk the you know, the folks following in the in in the footsteps can't just parrot that. They've gotta they've gotta internalize the message, internalize the product, internalize the broader strategy of what what we're gonna do, what we're not gonna do. The flying zones, the no-fly zones, and so forth. You know, I I I feel like I've I've heard you talk about the growth velocity, and there is a financial drag, you alluded to it just a moment ago, where you're talking about let's go hire a team. Let's go hire a team, let's just go get people. And at what point moving from that growth velocity into a place where there could be burning cash, spending too much, there's got to be processes to, you know, kind of hit the hit the pause button and define the sales process. Is there a CRM? If there is a CRM, does it have anything in it? Is it being used? If there's no CRM, what has been what has been used to track opportunities through their life cycle up to this point? And how, you know, then now what do you do with with no CRM? How do you implement that and how do you strike what's the what is the hidden cost behind scaling without those systems in place?

SPEAKER_01 20:20

I I like that, I like that phrasing hidden cost because a lot of the costs are indirect. Um everyone's thinking, well, you know, the obvious one is is lost sales, right? And and you can see that the cost is we're we're not meeting our numbers, but there's a lot of hidden cost, and that is in the time that is spent spinning your wheels. It's the time that you're having these valuable conversations, getting in front of really, really, you know, great prospective clients and not making, not meeting the mark, right? Not doing what what you should be doing because you don't have clear, clear path. Other hidden costs include poor forecasting, certainly longer sales cycles. So having it take longer to sell your product is going to be a huge cost. It's going to mean, you know, less so long sales cycles. Uh, the other thing is the distraction for executives, right? So if we have, if we are not, we don't have a system that runs efficiently, we're taking the time to go, what's going on? I want to get into the nitty-gritty. I want to dive into, you know, I am questioning the information in the CRM. Let's say we have a CRM and we're using it as a repository for information. Now we're diving in, looking into does this make sense? Um, and and all of this comes from, you know, not having a defined next step, um, doing manual reconciliation on things because you're not really trusting in the system. And we want to get to a point where you're not having all these, you know, these these indirect costs because you can you've got a system that's working and you can trust the information comping coming out of it. And so operational maturity is where you You want to go. That's where you stop burning quiet, you know, burning capital quietly. Like it's where you start to see things start to move faster.

SPEAKER_00 22:08

Offline, I've heard you talk about codifying processes and building usable, repeatable, expandable playbooks. What makes operational standardization so difficult inside scaling companies?

SPEAKER_01 22:21

It is difficult because in the process of creating, you know, of you know, codifying a process, you have to go through and look at what are we doing? And you're exposing the ambiguity in your system and you're exposing the problems in your system. And people have a hard time, you know, talking about this. They have a hard time admitting. And some of the feedback I've gotten from clients that I've met with, they say, thank you for providing an opportunity for us to engage around how we do things and why we do things and challenging us, right? And asking the questions to get us to really figure it out. So some of the things that we figure out is, you know, there's no system. And but high performers are usually going to find a way to compensate for lack of structure. They're going to be politically savvy. They're going to know how to do workarounds. They're going to figure out how to get things done. And a lot of times as leaders, we look at them and we say, wow, you know, this person is a really great performer. They're hitting their targets. They're doing really great things. Why isn't everybody doing that? And the problem is that that fantastic performer is very skillful, obviously, and very useful to have and all, you know, to keep on staff. But you can't scale that because that's one individual knowing how to be savvy, how to work things, how to, you know, get in the right meetings and all of that. So by creating the, you know, by codifying a process, it gives you the ability to really look at what you're doing, identify what you should be doing, find out where the gaps are, and create that consistency that you need in order to really scale. So creating the repeatable components, not creating bureaucracy. This is another reason why a lot of times it's hard for people to codify. And they're saying, oh no, I don't want to be bound by something. I don't want to always have to do things a certain way. I want to have the freedom to sell my way. And I never say, you know, you should lose your personality in a sales process. Absolutely not. Always keep your personality. People want to buy from a real person. They don't want a script. They don't want someone who's unnatural. So that piece is really important. You keep that, but having that operational, you know, efficiency is going to tell you what step to do next. It's going to tell you how do we, you know, how do we know when to speak to other people, other stakeholders, all of those different pieces, right, that we put together. But it is really hard. It's really hard for for, you know, for founders and for even established companies to take a minute to say, all right, let's put this, this process in in writing and see how it looks. I one of the things I do is a sales to service, you know, flow chart. And we we put it all down and that visual is so helpful. It doesn't mean it's the final sales to service, it's the how are we doing it now? And then we can see, right, what else, what else should we be doing? And it's really eye-opening. And so, you know, back to your question, why is it so hard? It's really just, it's kind of scary, I think. And it's cumbersome. It's cumbersome.

SPEAKER_00 25:19

Yeah. And then you in in some of your comments there, like you keyed in on the on the person that's the high performer and and the results that they're bringing. But maybe, and you you didn't say it directly, but I at least my mind thought of maybe the CRM hygiene isn't so great. You know, maybe the because they're they're selling based on their personality. And so you could have a lower performer whose CRM uh hygiene is is right on on top of things. And they're checking every box, they're filling in every, they're connecting every email, they're, you know, they're following through the task very scriptedly and very robotically, you might say, but the outcome is not as good as the person that's that's not doing what they need to in the CRM. It doesn't negate the underperformer's process, but and it doesn't justify the higher performer's non-compliance, but it's having the system in place that that is that guide, that way, that waypoint to go toward and to focus on and to get, you know, and and I think it brings equity to the system. You know, I I I guess I was trying to contain my smile as you were as you were talking, because I was just thinking, you know, about about my own CRM activity. And just recently my CEO was like, hey, you got some age stuff in here. And I was like, oh my God, why am I getting called out? No, like I know better than this, you know, I know better than this. I because I've always been an advocate, you know, I I I I I probably am an outlier when it comes to sales from a sales standpoint, because I've always been um, you know, pro CRM, active in the CRM. If it doesn't, if it's not in CRM, it's not real. But then also, you know, that call-out that he made led to a candid conversation about things that are gate kept in a CRM uh because maybe the the you know the biz dev person, the sales dev person is is not sure where it's really gonna go. It may not get off the ground. So it's like if I put it in there and it's not real, then I'm meant to be accountable for it. Why did you lose it? Well, it wouldn't ours to lose to begin with, but if I put it in there and then and you know, and so it's that debt gatekeeping my mentality. And so the system, the system brings all these disparate pieces into one place to help manage.

SPEAKER_01 27:27

And yeah, I mean that example, that's a great example of of of how we qualify, right? If if we don't think it's a good activity, then if we if if we don't feel confident about our ability to close it, then uh yeah, then maybe it shouldn't go in there and maybe we shouldn't chase it, right? Maybe, you know, so that's the other thing. There you go. Maybe we should be spending our time on the ones that really truly uh you know have checked all the boxes and and and we are, you know, can close faster, easier, we can be more successful at. And when I say successful, it's not just our success in selling, but also our client's success in finding a really great solution or a really great product. And so you want happy customers. You don't want to, you don't want to spend a lot of time chasing the really difficult sales. Now, there are some exceptions, but the majority of the time, there is a way to know whether something's gonna go or not. And yeah, and put it in the CRM if it's if it's qualifying.

SPEAKER_00 28:20

I know uh I've been in you you you and I both been in this this space for quite a bit of time, you know, after you know, I'm coming up quickly on a decade. So I've learned, you know, I've kind of built in this reflexive memory, this this muscle memory. And there are times where I'm I'm I just in in and could be so I'm selling myself short in some cases because I I will summarize uh an opportunity just in you know five, ten minutes conversation. I know if where it's gonna go and where it's not gonna go. And so sometimes just that and this goes back to you know, living and reverting back to the tribal knowledge instead of the system. It's like, you know, going back to what what the experience is versus the system, it's like, yeah, there's nothing happening here, you know, this is this is a pricing exercise. This is someone kicking the tires, this is someone that's that's curious, you know. I'm only going to relate to them on that basis and really nothing more. I'm I'm I'm looking for where my activity is most valuable and most needed. The system can help work through all of that, though, I think. Um so for for those in sales listening to this conversation, what Marcy's saying, probably go take a look at your CRM. This is your your call to action. Go check out the CRM at the end of this episode here.

SPEAKER_01 29:29

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:30

Well, let's talk about technology architecture and and and kind of you know the CRM as the system of truth since we're already talking about CRM stuff here. How often do do custom or excuse me, co companies treat CRMs like a like a filing cabinet? You know, just something to do, something else to do instead of operational and infrastructure. I I can see you probably have to sort some of that out with some of your clients. But it's more than just a filing cabinet. It's it's it's you you're you you you take the CRM and you operationalize it, and that's that's for a means to an end. It's not just for the company to pay for another software license.

SPEAKER_01 30:08

Definitely. I've you know, I've talked to companies who have, you know, smartly enough, they've said, hey, we should have CRM, right? And they go out and they subscribe to one and it comes with a general package. Like, this is these are the these are the the stages, just go ahead and use them, they'll be fine. And um and that's fine. And I think it's a good first step to say, yes, let's use who's a CRM to start tracking who we're talking to, what we've said, what we learned about them, all of that, even if we're using it as a historical um, you know, filing cabinet, that's that that is still helpful, right? It's still good to have. It's better than the information being scattered all over the place, someone having a um an Excel spreadsheet, somebody else having a notepad, whatever it is. So it's super helpful. But there is there is something to be said for really uh customizing that setup to match that buyer's journey. So we should be, we should know that we're we're using it to really tell us about the operational truth of this, of this um, of all of your sales. So the goal is that you're setting it up so that you're truly following what the buyer is, you know, how they buy. So every every stage in your in your CRM is telling you something and you can make decisions from it. So the best implementations are those that, you know, leadership and CFOs and everyone can say, oh, we believe what's in here and it's telling us something. It's telling us that this is the stage we get stuck in the most, or it's telling us this is how what our revenue should look like in Q4. All of those different things. So that's the difference between a repository or a receptacle of information and an actual system that you're running your business from. You've got more forecasting accuracy. You've uh you know that what's in there is truly qualified. And so, you know, you've got milestones that say until the client does this particular thing or we do this particular meeting or they give us the the the sign-off, this doesn't move to the next stage. And so that gives us that when we're all aligned on how a sales, a sale moves through the process, we can align on what it's telling us. We can believe the forecast, we can believe the progress in a in a sale. And so that's that's you know, that's the best, you know, the best usage of CRM. I I love doing this part. It it works directly with, you know, CRM sounds very tactical and it sounds very prompt and it sounds very cut and dry, but it it isn't cut and dry in the sense that you've got to do it in conjunction with your strategic planning. So how are we going to market? Who are we talking to? What do they care about? And what is their buying process? And that's how we build our sales motion, and that sales motion matches in the CR.

SPEAKER_00 32:53

Yeah, you you said that phrase, until the client does this thing, that's when the cue for the next step and the and the and the who, the what, the why. You're you're keying in on something that I know you you can speak to, and that's the customer journey. Because I'm I know for a fact a lot of businesses, I've been I've been a part of them, I've been a part of the strategy, the early GTM part, where businesses are building a process that is so assumptive in nature. It's it's basically built around this thought of how they think a customer will behave. It makes me think of all my martial arts training and all the all the all the pseudo-actions that you expect, but like like Mike Tyson says, everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the face. Oh, it didn't go the way I thought it was gonna go. And a lot of businesses are building these processes around how they think or want a customer to behave instead of how the customers actually will buy and what their path is. And so I'm sure you have to help your clients understand what a customer journey really looks like for them and for their product and for their solution. So, what have what have you learned about about helping your clients sort through customer psychology and buying behavior and all of that?

SPEAKER_01 34:04

Yeah, that's that's a great question because it's different for it's different for everyone, but there is some fundamental, you know, what what you mentioned about we really kind of build our process around how we want them to buy. We need we start to think, this is our product. We think it's amazing, and we want them to buy it this way, right? This is how it works best for us. And what we're not oftentimes not doing is finding out, well, what works for them. And so when I work with clients, we do a little bit of, you know, looking at their existing business, looking at their existing, you know, pipeline and finding out when we went, when we won, how did we win? What was the process?

SPEAKER_00 34:39

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 34:40

We also look at, we also do customer interviews. So I'll do, you know, I'll I'll contact customers and find out why did you buy product from this company and what did you think about these stages, right? And how how are how satisfied are you with the length of time or the number of steps it took, or what additional information did you require in order to make that decision? The other thing that I think uh a lot of companies do is they they they think of the sale as a very linear process and a very logical process. Well, if I talk about features and benefits, they're going to say, oh wow, that's great. I really want this benefit, right? Or I really want this feature. And what we're not always taking into account is that sometimes the purchase, the the buyer is it's an emotional thing, right? Or it could be a political thing, or there's, you know, we're not aware of all of the internal um the process they have internally. How do they make decisions internally? Who are the stakeholders that are gonna influence this and why? And so getting that alignment and getting that long-term confidence. I mean, ultimately, we've got to better understand the customer in order to sell them. And oftentimes we're we're just starting with, I know my product, it's amazing, these people are gonna love it, and this is how I want them to buy it. So that's that's some of the work I do. Ultimately, what we want to get to is let's put together a process that is gonna build trust and confidence. The the client has to know that they that that they're gonna benefit from your product, they're gonna be comfortable working with you, they're going to trust you and are willing to take risks with you. Because in this industry of infrastructure, it's, you know, it's it's sales cycles are long, it's a risky investment. You know, everyone's got to check those boxes to say, am I willing to do this with this particular, you know, vendor? So we've got to understand them better in order to sell them.

SPEAKER_00 36:37

You're you're preaching here. So good comment. This is really good, Marcy. I want to I want to talk about go-to-market noise. The market is obviously flooded with all kinds of buzzwords and thoughts, frameworks, AI, growth hacks, et cetera. From your perspective, though, what parts of of a modern go-to-market culture are legitimately valuable versus performative? And by the way, you can answer that from a number of different ways, whatever makes the most sense to you. But how do you how do you identify what's valuable versus just like performative? Whether we're, you know, we're kind of talking about CREM, but there's probably more to it than that.

SPEAKER_01 37:16

Yeah. Yeah. There are, yeah, there are there are a bunch of tools out there. There's all kinds of, I mean, there's so much software stacking, right? Everyone's just like, oh, I've got to have this and I've got to have that, and I've got to have another thing to integrate with. And, you know, there's so many tools. And I think what when I think about um particularly, you know, AI, I'm thinking about it's it's super helpful when it's it's it's very useful when it's decreasing administrative burden, right? Those repetitive tasks, it's very helpful when it's helping us improve visibility, right? So when we're looking at, hey, we have all this information and now we understand what are we seeing here. It's not um, it's not something that we want to to use when we haven't put the time and effort into developing a strong strategy. So sometimes the mistake is companies are bringing in all these tools, but they haven't taken that time to build out how they're really going to market. So if you have a weak go-to-market strategy and you throw a lot of cool, you know, tools on top of it, you're just going faster doing an ineffect, you know, following an ineffective process. So you're just, you may not get the results you want. Um, you may get some, but you're not, you're, you know, there's no changing, you know, it's not gonna fix positioning. It's not gonna fix ICP. Um, it's not gonna fix qualification. That's all still dependent on us. So a lot of times we're really, we're really obsessed about volume. Um but ultimately fundamentals still matter. So we've got to get the messaging right, we've got to get the process right, and then we can use these tools to go faster, to be smarter, to extract more valuable data from them to help us follow through, to help us really create that that mature process.

SPEAKER_00 39:01

You know, an AI principle is obviously garbage in, garbage out, good in, good out. What I also, and this is this is definitely an oversimplification of what you said. You said a lot of good things, but one of the things that came to mind was when you were talking about decreasing repeatable burden, the things, you know, kind of a repurposing of cognitive load. So you're not you're not using it for the menial task. So it's almost like don't create with it, refine with what you've already created. Is it's maybe an oversimplification. At least when it comes to AI, you know, and other tools. Um you know, I at the beginning of the call, I I mentioned uh your product scale. And I would like to talk about Clarative Strategy's program philosophy. And you've developed a program that's rooted in transformation. Obviously, you've you've gathered all your experiences, your knowledge, and and and from the places you've been, the teams you've led. But the program is rooted in transformation through focused operational intervention, not just an ongoing stickiness to your client that keeps them tethered to you indefinitely and doesn't help them be successful with your program. I'd like you to talk about scale and then also is is scale designed as as a s as a sprint, a long-term transformation, or both? Talk to us about scale. And obviously, as you're talking about it, just share enough with the audience that their their interest has peaked, but that they call you. So don't give all don't give it all away, but yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:24

I won't give it all away, but I'll give you enough to say I understand what she's doing here and how this can help. So to answer your question, scale is both a sprint and a marathon, right? Okay. It's a sprint in the sense that um, well, and scale stands for survey, clarify, architect, launch, and enhance. So in those five steps, there are different workshops and activities that we go through to get the strategy right, to get that momentum so that we can then build the sales playbook. And in the architect phase, we're building the sales playbook. We did all this work to say, okay, we really understand where we're going now. And now we've got to build a plan. And that plan is going to be the resource that the sales team uses, that leadership uses, that really anybody in the company can use because they'll they'll have that visibility into how do we do things here? And also where do we, where do we hand it off to operations and what did the sales team promise? You know, all of those different things. So we do Sprint because we, you know, we're working with companies who do need to operationalize quickly. They're running a business, they're running the day-to-day. And while they're doing that, that can't stop. We've got to keep going and build out this process. And so that we're we're we're going fast on the front end. Uh, launch and enhance the last two stages, that's where we say, okay, we've got a plan now and we're going to launch it. We're going to try it in in we're, we're going to train, we're going to practice, and then we're going to try it in the real environment. And we're going, I'm going to observe sales calls and we're going to look at what's working. And I'm I'll have one-on-ones with the team, with with the whole team. And I do a lot of one-on-ones throughout the entire process, but really identifying what's working, what isn't working, because ultimately a sales process is only as good as, you know, there's no point in following something that doesn't work, right? So we want to create it strategically, build it quickly, you know, execute, try it, you know, try it in the field, and then enhance, right? The last part is enhance. How do we make it better? What's working, what doesn't work? What let's let's make sure that everything is is is landing properly with the client. Operationally does it work. And so there's a bit of let's go back and and make sure we adjust if where where we need to, or maybe the process isn't wrong. Maybe it's just the execution that's wrong. And so we, or you know, we're having trouble with. So I'm working with teams to go, all right, let's try it, let's try this again. Let's go through what went well on this particular call and and what could we improve and how do we apply the process here? So in coaching, you know, coaching teams, at the end of the scale program, there is the ability, the opportunity to engage with me on a on a more like retainer type basis. And that is, you know, to continue, to continue that refinement, right? It oftentimes when I come back to help out, it's with uh either companies that don't have a clear sales org structure and they really need someone to come in and you know, maybe it's the CEO who's now managing sales and they go, hey, I I have a pretty good hold on this, but um all the the coaching and the additional reinforcement of the plan, I'd really love some help with. Um I also come back and do, you know, quarterly planning and quarterly reviews and you know, join sales calls and things like that. So the goal is to really create that capability for the company and not the dependency. So the long-term plan is you shouldn't need, you know, you shouldn't need someone forever, but you have the ability to have me there if you need me for that continuous improvement or the continuous reinforcement. Or, you know, maybe we have a really long sales cycle. And so it's really hard to see how this thing plays out in 12 months. So we want to keep you around to make sure we're putting it into place so we can measure before and after.

SPEAKER_00 44:02

Yeah. That's that's fantastic. It's it's beyond here's your playbook, good luck. It's here's the playbook that we've co-created. Right. And let's walk alongside each other as we go forward because the spirit of team of a team can change with a leadership shift. Maybe an exiting VP takes with takes with them, you know, a spirit and and influence within the team, or maybe there's a there's a shift in the team, a re-org, or uh a change in how the organization looks, and so there's always that need to come back and refresh and and and retouch and maybe refine, you know, a change based on how you know how how the architecture and spirit of an organization has adjusted. Um I I just have a kind of a future outlook question for you that I'd like to hear comments on. As AI begin uh becomes embedded into CRM and embedded into customer engagement, revenue operations, and all the other things, what what changes do you think will genuinely reshape how companies grow over time? I guess this is this is an AI question and maybe it's you know emerging technology question. But uh the reason I'm asking is is do you do you believe that things will kind of remain fundamentally human or will is this tooling going to going to reshape it in a way that where is it really going to shake out as it relates to CRM and revenue ops?

SPEAKER_01 45:20

Yeah, I think AI is really going to help in the selling mechanics side of things, right? So it's like the process, the efficiency, the better forecasting, the workflow automation, the things that are going to make us sell better. Um, even suggesting smarter engagement, you know, those types of things. So the selling mechanics piece is going to be really helpful. And I think that a lot of us are using some of this already, right? But the thing is that, you know, human trust still remains, right? I think I may mention to it before. Complex B2B sales, it's emotional. It's, it's, there's so much more than just than just like a quick software sale.

SPEAKER_00 45:59

RC, this has been a good conversation. RC, thanks for coming on Phil Frequency. This episode was produced and edited by the team at Autozi. To find out more, visit autosy.co a u t o z y dotco.