233: Tim O’Neil on Growing Organizations to Break the Predictable Growth Model

Hey, everyone. So this podcast has got my brain broke. Tim O'Neill, who's the CRO over at Alation, we had a executive roundtable where I get five, six, seven senior executives from decent sized companies, and we just talk about some of the challenges and everything else. And, and I facilitate the conversation. We did this about two or three weeks ago, and Tim brought up this model, this new model of how to grow organizations internally that breaks the predictable revenue model. And creates a whole new thing for SDRs, specifically their growth path, which I think is absolutely bananas and could be the whole new way that companies go to market right now. So I hope you enjoy this. If you're leadership, listen to this podcast and bring this idea back to your organization and chop it up a little bit.

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That's why I'm really happy to be having this conversation with a good friend, Tim O'Neill, who's the CRO over at Alation, my friend. How are you? Good, yourself? I am doing well, man. Like I said to everybody else here, you got my brain. I'm broken a little bit here, and I need to talk this through. Like a lot of times I use these podcasts as almost therapy sessions for myself or like venting out ideas. But before we get into why I want to have this conversation, Tim, just give a little background to the audience of where you're coming from and what you're doing right now. Sure. Well, Tim O'Neill, CRO at Alation, background, I've been enterprise sales for probably, you know, software sales about 20 years now.

Alation in and of itself sells to large enterprise customers. We sell what's known as a data catalog, which also helps with data governance and analyst productivity and whatnot. We're in the market competing with the likes of Calibra and Informatica and whatnot. So, pretty large sales organization. I have a department of roughly about, you know, 100 plus people. And we're doing, you know, large deals take four, five, six months. So, you know, growing pretty well and whatnot. All right. So, that's kind of what you're doing right now. And let me set the stage for everybody listening here. We had, what was it, two weeks ago we were at that executive roundtable, Tim? All right. Yeah. So, a couple of weeks ago we do these executive roundtables.

We get like five, six, seven CROs, CEOs, talk about trends, what are going on, and just share some ideas. And you brought up something about this new model of effectively predictable revenue, right? So, predictable revenue, for those who don't know, it's how everything's built here in SaaS. It's the segmentation of roles. It's, you know, Salesforce kind of identified it and wrote a book about it, I don't know, 15, 20 years ago at this point. And everybody follows it. So, it's SDRs take inbound, BDRs do outbound, then they graduate to AEs and they do SMB, mid-market enterprise. And then CS is sitting over on the side. I've been sweating it for a few years because I've always said that predictable revenue was a great model for us as organizations because it helps us scale.

We bring in cheap resources, we beat them up, and we grow sales reps, right, into AEs. Problem with that right now is twofold. One is most sales reps stay in their job, I think it's 1.8 years is the average right now. So, investing all that in cheap labor, expecting them to be great reps long-term for your organization, not really strong. And the other part is that the customer, it's not a great customer experience, right? You get handed off 15 times a four. You add that to product-led growth where getting it into the hands of people and really, not the freemium model, but like an actual product and helping them use it, seed and grow approach. And I've looked at the SDR saying, holy shit, what's going to happen in the next five years because of automation and all the tools and AI and all that other stuff.

Most of what an SDR is doing right now as far as cranking out template cadences and all that shit is going to go away. So, where does that leave these kids? And I've been sweating it. I've been trying to figure it out. And then all of a sudden, you brought up this model that I was like, it's like a light bulb went off in my head. And I was like, holy shit, where you take SDRs and you graduate them not to AEs, you graduate them to AMs, account management, customer success. You let them sit there. So, it's still a sale because they got to cross-sell, up-sell and renewals, but it's not as scary of a sale as a net new. And they get to learn the product. So, then after that, they then move into the AE and they're so much better positioned.

And I was like, fuck, that's the answer, man. So, I got to unpack this with you right here. So, first of all, Tim, talk to me about how you came to this. Like, what were some of the struggles? Did you come into Alation with the typical approach where SDR, BDR, AE, that type of thing, and you reworked it? Walk us through how you got here. So, I think probably the best way to think about it is this way. I, you know, in my role, SDRs often look for career guidance or, you know, often will reach out to sales leaders and ask the question, you know, because they think that's what they're supposed to do, which is, how do I become an AE, you know? And the worst thing you can do is ignore anybody. I think you have to listen and just, you know, whether you can solve the problem or not, you have to sympathize with the situation.

And after probably the second or third one of those calls being into the role of running, you know, running sales for the organization, I thought to myself, how do I have these discussions with them when I know deep in my heart there's probably not an SMB role for them? And so, you know, we were in the process of running out of command of the message and, you know, the premise of, you know, trying to find the current state and the future state and finding pain that you're solving for with the customer had me think about my pain, right? And what's my organizational pain and what's really important to me and coaching an SDR on solving our organization's pain versus their personal pain of not getting promoted.

And one of the biggest topics in the VC community is that our R nowadays, you know, and being assigned to ensuring you don't lose a customer, you don't churn a customer, and then helping, in essence, try to find some opportunities in that account where you can get new expansion revenue is a huge opportunity for the organization that they are always trying to solve. But it's not a huge risk for the SDR to go help you with that because you already have a contract. And so there was that thought in my head. And then the other thought in my head, which is, I need to set these SDRs up for success because the worst thing that you can do is put an SDR into a role where they haven't been developed, they don't have skills, six months in, they're out.

And then they go and take a worse AE gig somewhere else because they want to be in AE. And I've messed their career up for five years, all because I'm trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. And so as I thought through things, I was like, this scenario is more of a problem for me, and they helped me solve it. And them asking for business from a current customer or a renewal from a current customer is way less friction than trying to get a new logo across the line. So then I thought about the motion. And if you think about it from a pre-sales to post-sales standpoint, if my pre-sales team works on developing the value, hey, here's the business pain, here's the whatever, here's the SE, here's the AE.

And the handoff goes to a CS person and a renewals rep to help them recognize that value. They're also sitting there realizing that in sales, you're supposed to tie to value to be able to earn your right to get that renewal. And so that's where I ended up with it, because it helps solve a problem. It ties to my own business pain. The customer wins because they get passed to somebody that actually wants to go and deliver that value for them. And they win because they're getting commercial experience and trying to get something across the line. They have a quota. They're looking for expansion stuff. And if they can show you what great looks like, I can go then move them into an AE role by being de-risked because they've had some commercial opportunities.

Yeah, it just makes so much fucking sense. A couple of really tactical questions here. What is their title? Is it CS? Is it AM? I have a CS person and then an accountant manager role for my post-sales team. My pre-sales team is an account executive and a sales engineer. Okay, cool. So the SDRs move into the CS or the account management? They move into the account management. Okay, perfect. And the CS person is kind of like their SE in the pre-sales cycle. So they still figure out how to leverage that relationship between the two roles too. Love it. And is there a timeframe that you force them to stay in that role? Because the challenge I see there is a little bit is you don't want customers, you don't want people flipping customers.

You know, you don't want a new, a lot of the appeal of being an existing account is that you have an account manager and they're with you for the life cycle, right? Or whatever. But is there anything about like, you know, how long they have to stay in that role to ensure the customer doesn't get annoyed with you flipping people in and out of it 50 times? Yeah, I mean, so I haven't gotten there yet. My, you know, some of my mentors would probably tell me that it's good to establish probably a 12 to 18 month model for, you know, keeping them in that role. I think that's probably right, but I haven't put down a heavy, like you have to be in there for 12 to 18 months. We just started rolling this out about, you know, nine months ago, so it will evolve.

But I do think that the one thing if you've done correctly is they stay within that territory, right? So if they do that correctly, the customers that they're serving and helping, you know, get value out of, eventually they'll be able to call them back up for references to their new logo opportunities. And so it will be less friction in that scenario. So I think the key is to make sure that they're still assigned to it the same patch when they get out into the, you know, new logo opportunities. Cool. And I'm guessing the CS is the one that would just stay consistent maybe for a longer period of time too. So they, at least there's some sort of continuity there from a client standpoint. So what have you been seeing so far?

I mean, I know it's only been nine months here, but first of all, talk to me about when, was this, when you kind of landed on this, did you announce it to the company as a new way that we're going to market here with this structure? Did you ease it in and how, how was it received? We didn't necessarily announce, maybe we did. I mean, we, we said, this is new, what we're doing now, right? It was very well received. Some of the AEs were a little nervous because they're like, Hey, wait, am I not involved in the renewal anymore? And you had to kind of do a little bit of a, you know, what everybody's roles and responsibilities were within an account and whatnot. That was probably the biggest friction, to be fair, right?

Everyone else was quite excited about it, but the biggest friction was probably, Hey, where's my swim lane? And then just establishing those swim lanes. And I think analogies always help people too, is, you know, what I kind of told the field was, Hey, if you ever go out to dinner and you have one server at your table or you have three, three is better than one. And so let's just make sure that we're understanding that we're all here to help the customer get value. And so let's, in a lot of these customers are large enterprise customers. There's a lot of opportunity for us. So let's make sure that, you know, we're not fighting over, you know, things that we shouldn't be fighting over. So it was pretty well received and we've gotten some really cool results out of it too.

I was going to say, that's what my next question is. What are you starting to see from a result standpoint or even feedback from a client standpoint too? Renewals were check the boxes for us. You know, like it was like a, yeah, we got a renewal. Now renewals are opportunities for us. And, you know, looking at different ways to structure renewal or, you know, get multi-year renewals out of a one-year renewal. And just looking at ways commercially that we hadn't previously done where, you know, previously we'd just look at renewals just to get in the door. Now we're looking at different ways in which we can find upsell opportunities, find, you know, expansion opportunities. And it's created some, it's bared some good fruit.

From a customer standpoint, for the most part, it's been positive because you have people assigned to them trying to take that value from what they had in the pre-sale cycle. And someone's running with that as opposed to checking in with it. They're running with it to make sure that it continues. I love it, man. I think this is like, it's almost like I want to do a use case on you guys and follow from nine months ago to the, you know, two years. We started with a certain subset and I believe we'll say we're early stages. I believe we'll expand it next year because it's going well. Well, the other part of this that this addresses too, and I mean, there's a transition here because of where we are right now, but we're in a transition anyways.

Is, is so many people who have gotten into customer success or account management, they got into those roles because they didn't want to sell. Right. And now I'm seeing this. We actually hired a director of customer success back a year and a half ago because we were so seeing so many customer success coming into our trainings because the sales leader would say, hey, we need top line revenue, whatever it is. Oh, by the way, you mind if we throw in like three or four of our customer success people in here because they kind of got to do the same thing. And it's funny, you know, when I train CS or AMS, it's like if they're in the same training that I do with the AEs and the SDRs, they inevitably come out of it going, well, that was good.

But, you know, I wish it was more customer service oriented. Right. But if I just do a session just for customer success and I take the word sales out of it, but keep the exact same content, they come out of that going, holy shit, that was exactly what I needed. Like, thank you so much. Right. So there's a perception reality because it's almost like this visceral reaction they have when you ask them to quote unquote sell because of what their perception of sales is. And they're like, I don't want to do that. But now I got to cross sell upsell. I get the renewal piece of this, but cross sell upsell like that's just that seems like salesy. And it's like, no, I always tell them, like, if you take the word sales out of the equation, customer success and sales are pretty much the exact same thing.

You're helping people solve problems or achieve their goals. That's fucking it. It's I told the team when they started the process was that the pre-sales team, you know, they have anywhere between, you know, two and five one sales cycles. Right. I said, depending upon your contract, you have a one year, two year, three year sales cycle. And the difference between the pre-sales team and your team is yours has an end date. Yeah. Guaranteed. Yeah. The pre-sales team may change sometimes based upon some factors that they don't have, but they budgeted for this because they already signed it. And the end date is a certain period of time from now. So the nice thing is, is you have a very predictable, manageable process that you can get to it.

But it is a sales cycle. Yeah. Well, and this is also where, you know, let's go back to the whole idea of product led growth. Right. One of the cool things about product led growth that I like is you get it in the hands of the users, but then there's you use analytics and AI, which obviously you're pretty familiar with based on what you guys do to find like the use case or like the triggers that say, oh, this is in danger or this is a good thing. Right. I think, I don't know if it was you that brought this up, but, or like, oh no, I was talking to Doug Landis and he said, look, we had it at box. We knew that if it box, if you downloaded as a user, if you downloaded box and you did not share a file within the first seven days, it was like a 98% failure rate.

It was like, see you later. Nobody's ever going to use this. So what they would do is like at day five, if you hadn't shared a file, you got an email that said, hey, you haven't shared a file yet. Why don't you try it today? See what happens. Boom. And then, right. It's the same thing with renewals too. We can now look at data that says, hey, how are they using this? And what are the usage metrics? And what are the, you know, adoption things and see which ones are red flags that I have to jump in early or green flags that I have to keep reinforcing. So are you, are you looking at that type of data? Oh, yeah. I mean, if you, I would say back to what we've said about, you know, AEs, AEs, when we're responsible for the renewal, get a Salesforce report.

This is, this is coming up in 90 days. So send your 90 day email out. Yeah. Right. If an AM comes in one, they start to create predictable process around what looks like a good account, what looks like a bad account, things like that. But then also you can get to the point of, you know, like you said, with the box scenario, like who started off poorly? It's usually the starting off poorly is the predictor that they're going to churn. It's not the, you know, it's the, hey, they started off poorly and they've stopped communicating. Right. You know, and if you have someone assigned to that early, early stage process, getting on a product issue or getting on a communication issue, or, you know, all of a sudden they've pivoted the use case to go after something that isn't ideal for your organization.

You can redo that a lot quicker, especially with somebody that's measured on the renewal, you know, and someone that wants to go and talk to the business executive business sponsor, you know, way more than they do want to get technical under the weeds to try to figure out what's going on. And they can re kind of bring that account back to life by, you know, hey, why did we sign this? Why are we here very quickly as opposed to waiting six months? Yeah. Yeah. And I, and I always said that the, you know, and this guy also, you know, it flows in with a lot of some of the other stuff I've been talking about, which is the, the shift to from top down to bottom up, right. Where, you know, and I say this all the time before COVID growth economy, normal, somewhat normal rules apply, right.

You go after the executive with an email or a phone call, you get referred down, you do your thing and then whatever. Um, but in growth in that's in growth economy, in down economies, um, executives aren't really willing to make what I would consider unpopular decisions, right? Like just doing something new that doesn't have the consensus of the group, because there's, there's not only risk in, will that work? There's risk in, you know, alienating your, your employees. And right now it's a, it's a seller's market in the sense, like if I'm a sales rep right now, it went from a buyer's market to a seller's market real fast because now all the studs, there's no more connection to the business. I'm no longer grabbing drinks with my team.

I'm no longer having the fun lunches and, and hanging out. So with that, you know, going top down, you know, those pieces involved, you go bottom up now where you gather insights from the lower people down, you know, from the individuals, users, that type of thing, which SDRs are, are trained to do is gather information. And then you feed that information up top to go top down with a hypothesis of, Hey, we, we know your business now, and this is what we see we can help. So that also gives the SDRs another avenue to collect information from people with existing customers, as opposed to, you know, net new ones. Well, the other thing to think about to done correctly is in my mind, because obviously we're still working through this, but if the AM from SDR to AM goes into a major account and is assigned to that, that account to make sure it renews.

If it's a major account that's over, you know, a billion in revenue or however many people, there's likely different departments that you can sell it to. Okay. So if you go to an AM and you don't kind of, you know, really, you know, scare them with, go find out everything you know about this company, you just say, find out about this department. And they're focused in that department. Who's the economic buyer? Who's the politics in this department? And meanwhile, the AE can go and spread out because he has a license to sell into other departments. Now, now all of a sudden they're partnering with an AE on how to expand a major account and how to navigate a major account. And that's a skill set that is very different than just prospecting and researching a company to prospect.

Now you're in the account and understanding how procurement happens and understanding who's involved, how to understand how budget releases, who's actually, and you're learning a lot of nuances about the account. While you're watching your AE expand in the account to get different people in place, it creates a lot of different skills that we are needed to be an account executive in the organization without throwing them into the fire. Yeah. I mean, I say it all the time, business acumen. I tell kids because I've, you know, look, tips, techniques, whatever that, that stuff comes and goes, right? I mean, what was, what worked six months ago is probably not working now, but if you want to do something to improve your career exponentially, it's focused on business acumen, right?

Focus on learning how to speak to executives, learning how businesses work, how to read a PNL, those types of things. If you do that, then don't need techniques because now I'm in a cool conversation. I mean, I might need a technique to, to just catch your attention, Tim, to give me some time. But once I, once we agree that you're going to give me a few minutes of a conversation here, whether it's on a prospecting call or an existing client or whatever it is. Now, if I get business acumen, I can just have a conversation with you. I don't have to worry about bringing you through Bant or Medic or some fucking agenda or any of that crap. All right, y'all. SDR growth is changing rapidly. That path has been evolving for a long time.

And Tim O'Neill and John discussed some emerging models that are kind of positioning SDRs for success in a new way. Incredible value in this conversation. So listen, send me your sales wins. I want to get them at jamesatjbarrows.com to be shouted out next week on Make It Happen Mondays. Today, we're giving a big shout out to ReviewTrackers. They started using video with Morgan J. Ingram and our partners at Vidyard. 60 days of video usage was the experiment. Within the first two weeks of using the platform, four meetings were set with Vidyard videos alone. Personalization across the board increased by 100% from the prior two months. They saw a 22% increase in open rates, a 4% increase in click rates, and a whopping 92% increase in reply rates using Vidyard for their prospecting efforts.

Way to go and way to start using modern sales techniques that really make a difference. Shout out to you, ReviewTrackers. Keep learning and keep burning. We see your fire. Let's throw it back to JB and Tim. Well, the other part of it, too, if you think about it, right, is in the pre-sales process, a lot of the challenges nowadays is people come into a pre-sales process very educated, you know? And so they may come in with, does your product do this? Does your product do this? Very feature function oriented. And it takes a certain skill to say, hey, let's park that over in the corner for a second. Let's, you know, reassess the business value or how are you doing that today? Why is that important to you?

Like, you know, that's not something that's easily done out of the chute for an AE. That takes a few years of experience. But if you start with the renewal, that business value has been established, actually. So very rarely are you getting the, hey, does it do this? Does it do that? You're more getting the, we need it to do this use case. And you're understanding use case development and use case execution, which is so much more important to it as the sales executive than feature function selling. Oh my God. Yeah. I mean, that, that's that the feature function stuff is what's going to get replaced. Right. Cause if you, if you get stuck on a spreadsheet with the, you know, you guys do this, you're a, that's not selling.

First of all, right. That's just, okay, here's the features. That's why I like, I hate RFPs because it's like, whatever, you know, you're just going to put this on a stupid spreadsheet. But when you can get to that real conversation with existing customers who are, who are willing to have the conversation with you because they've already bought it. And now they're trying to figure out a way to get the most value out of it so they can succeed. And you make that connection there. The amount of learning that, that if they pay attention is off the charts, off the charts about how the different roles, how the different departments work and everything else. Do you give them a structure on that note?

Do you give them a structure, uh, to approach existing accounts in a business acumen oriented way? Like what, how, what are some of the metrics that you use or, or things that you say to them outside of, Hey, here's your patch. And here's, you know, here's the renewals that are coming up in the next year for you. Um, what's the structure that you're giving them guidance on to make sure that they don't come across as salesy, you know what I mean? And do come across as that real, you know, consultant that they want to work with, to get their business up to the next level. I probably need to do a better job with that. What I currently do is, you know, when we, uh, when we, uh, contract with a client, there's a pretty, uh, solid command of the message deck built out that understands value.

And we pass that to, you know, an AE so they can, or sorry, an AM so that they can understand that and refer to that through their conversation. With that organization, you know, um, I've probably got to do a better job of skillset training. Like, Hey, at different phases in the renewal process, we should be looking for this and we should be delivering this value, looking at this many users, all that fun stuff. That's probably the next phase of it for us. Um, the thing that we're doing well at the end of the cycle is we used to give just one year quotes. Now we're giving three quotes, you know, and not really one year options anymore, you know, and it's driving better discussions around. Well, maybe we need more in year two, you know, maybe we do want to do a multi-year deal.

What does it look like to do a multi-year? And it's driving, uh, some business value discussions there. Whereas before we would just do a one year renewal just to, just to move forward. Because it was easy. Yeah. It was easy and it was standard and it was like good to go. And that, and that's, I think where the beauty of, of introducing sales into that renewal process is, I mean, I think we did it with you guys that give, get scorecard, right? I think that's one of the more universal ones because it, it's not, it's not like quid pro quo, like I'll do this if it's no, like I want to give you that. And in order for me to give you that, this is what I need from you. So it's reciprocity there. And it's a much more confident thing for the reps to be asking for things when they know why they're asking for them and what they have to give away and what options they have.

And if you're going into a renewal and you're just going for one year, you have very little give to get, you know? Very little. Have you ever read, um, I just did a podcast. He's coming out with another, uh, book, Todd Caponi. Have you ever read, um, uh, uh, um, what was it? Transparency sale? You got to read it, man. Yeah. Yeah. You'll, you'll love this because it's literally about transparency. And what he does is he'll, he'll roll into a conversation with a renewal, with a customer or anybody. And he'll say, Hey, look, here's the deal. Here's the rate card, right? This is what this costs, what you want. Um, I know you're probably going to want a discount here. So, so, so let's talk about the levers that I have.

That's what we do. But I, I mean, we take it like, Hey, you can do multi-year commits. You can do all. You can do it. Here's the levers. Let me teach you how to negotiate and win with me. Right. And, and then the best part is, is you go, Hey, listen, they're in the quarters, you know, what, July or June or whatever it is. And, you know, I'll say, John, you know, it's my quarter and, you know, we've talked about doing this. We have a map and it doesn't seem like we're going to hit the date. Like what's going on here. You know, I need your help. And when you say, well, Tim, is the price going to change? The transparency sale that we do is we're like, actually, John is not, I'm not going to lie to you.

Like, I'm going to take your money the first week of next quarter too, because I have quota. Thank you. But at the end of the day, I, I said July to my boss. You said July to me. I personally would really appreciate it if we keep trying. There you go. And that goes so much further than some salesy, you're going up 10% discussion with so many humans because you're going to be a human, you know? God, I hope people are listening to this because like the fucking discount sale, the end of the month discount sale is the saddest sale I've ever seen in my life. And because everybody knows the discount doesn't go away at the end of the week or the month. I mean, shit, what did your profitability change over the weekend for crying out loud?

Are you out of your mind? Like, fine. If I'm, if I'm a jerk client, then I'll be like, fine. And if I don't need it, if you haven't created, you know, uncovered urgency and impact there, then I'll be like, you know what? Then fine. I'm going to wait till the end of next quarter. I'm going to actually wait till the end of the year because that's when I know I'm going to get my biggest leverage here. So go piss off. Right. And that transparency of look, this is what you said, which is like documenting it and holding them accountable for those type of things. Like, let's be honest. It's not going to change. But you gave me your word here. And I'll tell you right now, that would hit, at least me, if you said that to me, I'd be like, shit, man, you're right.

All right. Let me go see if I can make this happen for you. Exactly right. And if I was just like, hey, John, you know what? Like, we've established a good rapport. I think I've done right by you through this entire process. I didn't, you know, hold you over a barrel to say, June, we walked through this. But at the end of the day, I have a job. It's to sell stuff and it's to forecast. And I understand that we're not tracking for June, but I'd really, really wish that we could do some stuff to try to get June back on track. Can we just talk for 10 minutes on what we can do? Let's explore everything. Let's get creative. So I always, the word I say, get discount out of the vocabulary, change it to creativity, flexibility.

I go with coach. Hey, John, can you coach me how you think we could get this done? I like that. You know? Yep. Another small phrase that Todd uses is he actually phrases it, I'll pay you in the form of a discount. So I'll pay you, like, instead of me giving you a discount, I'm paying you. Because that's really what's happening ultimately. Like, if I'm a sales rep and I'm going to get commission out of this and you're asking for money off, that's literally money coming out of my pocket, right? So I am paying you for that discount. I am paying you. And so he says, he's, look, I'm willing to pay for better payment terms. I'm willing to pay for longer term contracts. I'm willing to pay for bigger contracts with clients.

That's, I'll pay for all that stuff. So let's talk this through. And it just becomes this collaborative conversation of how you can both get what you need when you see what's on the table for everybody. Well, and sometimes, too, in that process, even if you have a great map, things come out because they miss stuff. And maybe, like, you know, say, for example, you know, John, you have signed authority up to 100 grand. We have a three-year deal on the table that's 500 grand. You know, and we discover through this process, like, hey, you could sign a one-year deal for 100K. And then it's now me to bring to my business. We can take a 500K deal for three years next quarter or a 100K deal for, you know, this quarter.

Hey, business, what do you want? And now I've at least, you've helped me solve the problem and it falls back in my core. And man, is that a bunch of hell. Like, if I had a rep, whoever, I think I'd fall out of my chair if a rep came back to me with something like that, you know what I mean? Like, hey, John, look, I can get that five-year, but it's going to, I know they said they were going to sign now, but it's not going to be until a couple of weeks here. I can get the 100Gs right now for this month. Do you want it? To me as a manager, I'd be like, holy shit, wait a minute. You're coming to me with options that are both pretty damn good here for us? Because a higher rate at a one-year or a longer term at a lesser?

Like, shit, man. Okay, I'm paying attention to that rep. That's what we try to coach our team on is, is don't you say no for us. Right. Yeah. You know? Yeah, I mean, everything's negotiable at the end of the day, as long as there's good faith that we're both at least trying to walk away. I mean, because that's the other thing about these, like, tactics about, you know, discounting and all that other stuff is, like, we're, if it, that would work if it was, like, a one-call close, short-term relationship, who cares what happens, but in this world that we're in, that relationship lasts, and what's the dangerous part about, the other, another thing I love about this is that, you know, it helps coach reps on what a discount does to the renewal.

Yes. Because you get the next year, and it also coaches them on when to approach a discount, because if someone's not asking for it, why are you discounting? Right. God. And it also does three, I love three quotes. I always tell people, you know, if you look at behavior analytics and whatnot, right, do you know the second, or sorry, do you know the most purchased wine in any restaurant USA? I don't. It is the second cheapest wine on any list, right? Because most people don't know wine, and they don't want to be cheap, okay? So if you're a cab person, you go to the second cheapest in the cab thing. If you go to, you know, Sauvignon Blanc, you're the second cheapest, like, everyone's the second cheapest, you know?

And it's like 70% of wine bought is like the second cheapest wine on the wine list, you know? And if you go to a customer and you give them three quotes, I mean, John, if I gave you three quotes, what are you probably going to do? I'm going to win almost all the time. Yeah. I mean, unless there's exponential value in that top one, you know what I mean? Like, you know, and it's that much better. Sure. But, you know, usually it's, yeah, that, that one is, you know, three, three little bears, right? Goldilocks here. Oh, shit, man. So, all right. What are you, what do you not know yet above this model? Uh, I don't know if they should know an expansion yet. Okay. Okay. So right. As of right now is just renewals.

It's not expansion. Okay. Good point. Uh, the reason why is, um, I'm cross department, right? Do I want them involved in a single department just expanding in that department or do I want them to be focused on, you know, cause the thing is, if you think about comp and we got to figure out what you're trying to solve for, am I trying to solve for, I'm trying to reduce my renewals or sorry, reduce my churn, or am I trying to solve for, I need to grow expansion. And so it's kind of tough to comp someone on two things, you know, that are equally important to your organization. And so you almost want to say, I want one person on an expansion and I comp you. So you're looking for expansion and one, and I haven't solved that one in my head yet.

Uh, but that's it because it's tough to, you know, tell someone to do two things. Great. Well, this almost leads to, uh, the pod discussion, right? Where you have, you could potentially have an SDR like on it for existing accounts, right? You have an SDR that calls into existing accounts for those, for those renew, you know, those cross sell upsells that then flips to an AE. So they work together on that. Then you have an AM working on the renewal and the CS layering in the middle. So it's almost like you have that four person pod right there. Now an SDR, you have an SDR for net new and you have, you could have an SDR for existing. And that's again, either one of those SDRs can move into that role, right?

Shit, man. I love this. All right. Yeah. I mean, I, like I said, I got to wrap my head around a little bit more of, of this. Cause I, I genuinely think that this is the answer for SDRs, uh, it has to be. And the reason why is a combination of two things. One, and I, and I was kind of alluding to this on our, on our call, like two, three weeks ago is with PLG, everyone's going to be so much more focused on, you know, look at a lot of the public companies or ones that are about to be public anymore that are, they're about to be public that are PLG. They're copying their sales reps based upon, you know, consumption. Yeah. Okay. Go land, but consumption is huge. And so how do you get people to consume?

You tie things to value and you tie things to, you know, using the product. Right. And if you're learning that in a renewal process, that's going to be so important to the future of PLG that it's a critical skillset that any salesperson is going to have to be able to figure out. And in this scenario, they'll get to be, you know, do it in a very frictionless sort of way. And, you know, heck, who knows what CS is going to look like with the PLG world. There's some companies that don't have it, you know? I was going to say that might go away. Like with CS moving this way towards sales a little bit and with SDRs moving towards customer success. And like, I think actually SDRs are, most of them as it stands today are going to roll up under marketing and operations and just be kind of more salaried roles where they're looking at data and they're sending out their cadences and they're doing ABM stuff.

And my thought was that we were going to have to then develop full cycle sales again, but I didn't know where that was going to come from. Now it comes from CS, but we give them that path. Help them with the consumption, help them with adoption. And then you figure out the stories and then you can actually truly outbound as an AE because you know the stories. You're not just regurgitating it. You live the story and you can talk about it and use them as referral customers. All right. So I'm dead serious. I think I might like get a writer here to help me write all this shit out and stamp this as the new model. And by the way, I'm going to give you full credit for all this shit. But cool, man. Well, look, anything else that we missed on this that you wanted to get out there?

I think the only thing that I would say is that as of right now, it's important to understand that I don't have an SMB role in my organization. And so what I haven't figured out is if I do have one, does AM go to SMB? Do they stay in the same pod that we kind of discussed? You know, I haven't figured that part out yet, but I still think it's probably similar to what we discussed, which is you just have an SDR that covers SMB and they move to an SMB AE role. And it's like, hey, if you want to be a large enterprise rep, right, you'll go from this to AM to AE. You know what I mean? The only problem with that model is you still probably have someone from a CS perspective and AM perspective assigned to the SMB market.

I got to just think, I haven't thought through it because I haven't been, I don't have a huge, I don't have an SMB man. Well, and it's also, and that's why I don't think it's that big of a deal because I don't think so many organizations are not built to really do predictable revenue the right way, because that is the right way is if you were big enough to have the segmentation roles and you do have SMB mid-market and enterprise because that works, but without SMB and also just the cost of the cost of sale for SMB, it's just not worth putting resources on it to a certain degree. I think a lot of the SMB stuff is going to be automated as it stands and they'll get maybe a group AM where they can make a phone call to somebody and we'll look at analytics and send an email out every once in a while saying, hey, what's up?

But I think the majority of the SMB stuff is going to be automated if done right. I think thinking through it, you know, you don't have, you have like, you know, at a large enterprise, you have, you know, a CS&AM, like, you know, maybe, you know, a 10 to one model, but if an SMB is probably like 50, you know what I mean? So you just, it just, the model is different, you know? Cause it's all about cost of sale. Like I, you know, I have a few friends who, you know, they're hiring sales reps and their ACV is like 50, you know, like $500. And I'm like, guys, don't like, you can't, you can't, I mean, they have disclosed so many deals in order for them to be worth it. You can't comp them in a way that's going to attract people.

Like you have to have a different model with the SMB. If you're, if you're, if your ACV is less than a grand, you can't pay a sales rep 80 grand to go get a thousand dollar client. That's exactly like, it's just like, it's like, you have to make this frictionless. You have to have to make it easy. Give them a phone number to call, but don't be sitting there, you know, having sales reps. Cole call into SMB accounts at this point. That's a marketing function and an automation function in a lot of ways. Awesome, Tim. Well, look, you gave me more to think about here. I'm going to keep chewing this around in my brain. I'm going to come back to you. We're changing. I'll be happy to tell you in a few months, you know, our end of fiscal year is end of January.

We'll be doing some, some different creative stuff. And I'll be happy to report back on any sort of changes we're doing next year. How the model's going. You know what I mean? Let's do that. Let's definitely get together, you know, another six, six to eight months or something like that and see what you're seeing and if it's breaking, if it's still working and what, what tips have you made to it? And you know what, too, at some point, you know, to be fair, was it my idea? Sure. But as we progress with it, we should talk to my team and let them talk to you about what they're, what they're doing well with their experience and all that stuff. Because, you know, listen, I'm the head of the organization, so everything is rosy and I'm sure it's like easy and fantastic and whatnot.

You should talk to them and hear what. Yeah. It's like, well, so it's funny you bring that up. What we're going to do is the journey, right? For us. Yeah. Everybody's always more interested in the journey. I think we got a cool crew here. I got 10 people on squad and everybody's going in their different direction. So what we're going to do is we're going to do almost like a reality TV show series where we got our, you know, we're going to do these type of things and, you know, whatever. But we have a guy who does B-roll and everything else. And we're going to set up the, uh, remember the real world confession booth? We're going to have the real world confession booth. And I'm going to tell him like once a week, you got to sit down in the confession booth for 30 minutes and just vent, right?

Like talk about what's going on and talk about your journey. And I will never see these. So you can literally be as open as you want. You can say, John sucks. You know, this week he was all over me and fuck him and blah, blah, blah. And then my editor after a year of that type of content is going to put all that stuff together in a kick-ass like story with maybe a series or so. We should do, you know, we could do the same thing. I'm going to steal that idea from, from you. You should, because look, you're creating content anyway. You just go on black, like, like on every different department, like, Hey, you know, the, the, uh, the head of, you know, whatever stands up, we had an awesome year.

We're the best and you know, nothing ever is going to be better. And you know, your world is, is better because we're in it. Right. And then like they get off the stage and they have the B-roll content of everybody talking about how it wasn't the best and it could have been better. You know, and people have the choice to like blur out their face if they want to. So they could just unload and be like, fuck that guy. You know, that's great. I love it. Awesome, brother. Well, look, uh, tell people, and by the way, uh, you know, tell people where to go, because if I'm a new, a, if I'm a new SDR or I'm an SDR worried about the future for me, I am seriously considering, uh, taking a look at elation here.

So tell people where to go, uh, and how to find you and where you want, what, what you want people to know about. Uh, well, I mean, we're hiring, we're hiring, geez, we went from 200 people last year to like 500 people this year. We're, we're hiring like, like gangbusters. So there's opportunities in our organization all over the place, sales, pre-sales engineering, um, probably the best place to go is just elation.com. Uh, we post all of our jobs there, or, uh, we have a very, very robust talent team. Uh, we have a, a person that's head of talent, uh, if not two or three people for talent in each of our functions. Um, so please just look them up on LinkedIn as well. We are always looking for strong candidates in every function.

And I would argue that, uh, quite frankly, I am, uh, an amateur as compared to my peers at this company. So there's a lot of good people to work for at this organization and, uh, would highly recommend reaching out, you know? Awesome. Yeah. Awesome. And again, for people listening on the podcast, it's elation, A L A T I O N. Is that just the website to elation.com? Yep. All right. Perfect. And it's Tim O'Neill O apostrophe N E I L. Check them out on LinkedIn, connect with them, uh, and follow that journey. Cause I, I think it's going to be a fun one, man. So thanks so much for coming on board, man. I really appreciate it. John, thanks for having me. And, uh, when you guys have your event in Boston, maybe I'll stop in.

Perfect. All right, everybody. Well, hopefully you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. Um, got you to think about a little bit different things and, and, uh, you know, about your career, about the future of sales and all that other stuff. And so look, like I say, at the end of all my podcasts here, no matter how shitty your day was, go out there and make somebody smile today. Cause if you make somebody smile today, you know, you had a good day in the world needs a lot more of that right now. So thank you all for listening. I'll see you on the other side. Let's make it happen. All right, y'all. That's a wrap. As always, we encourage you to become a JB sales member and gain access to the JB sales team.

Our training, our courses, tips, webinars, and replays are all available for you at on demand.jbarrows.com. Follow us on Instagram for daily sales techniques and tactics at JB sales training, all one word. And we'll catch up with you on the gram. Have a great week. Everybody get out there and serve those clients, catch up with those prospects. Be sure that you are asking the right questions, doing the right things and serving people to the best of your ability. Get out there and make somebody smile today. It'll make your day and theirs. We'll see you next week when we bring you another stellar guest to help you sell better. Make it happen. Make it happen, everybody.