The CRO Outlook — 2026 Predictions for the Future of Revenue Leadership

Julia Nimchinski:
Definitely will. Thank you. Well, coming up is CRO-centric panel, hosted by one and only Seth Mars. Super excited for this one. Seth, how are you doing? Chief Strategy Officer at Sandler. Forgot to say.
SethMarrs:
Yeah, I’m really happy to be here, talk to a bunch of smart people. It’s always, always fun.
Julia Nimchinski:
All stars. I’m bringing on Kelly. One question, and the stage is yours. What’s your top prediction for GTM and AI for 2026?
SethMarrs:
For me?
Julia Nimchinski:
Yeah.
SethMarrs:
So, biggest one for me, and I’ll ask about it with the panel, is I see a transition away from efficiency into effectiveness. I think there’s a real opportunity on the effectiveness side. I think it’s the opportunity that we put the rails on through efficiency. And the effectiveness side is where you start getting real gains in… in sales, and in go-to-market.
Julia Nimchinski:
Awesome. Take it away.
SethMarrs:
Okay, great. So, hello everyone. I’m just starting out, we’ll do some introductions in a second. I want to start baseline with the analysts and me with a little bit of data and information. So, many of you may have seen this, but there was a study that Yale did a few months ago, where they really looked into, like, they wanted to look on the impact of AI on jobs, and they used this stat called Occupational Mix, and what that means is a percent difference relative to a starting point. So, say, if you, like, that change is the number of new workers in an occupation. So, this can occur with changing jobs, losing jobs, or unemployment, just to try to get a feel of what type of change is happening with new technology when it comes out. So, they looked at it in the context of computers, a big change that happened. They looked at it in the context of the internet, big change that happened, and they looked at it with AI. And the interesting part about that that happened was they all kind of had the same arc. So, these two big things, computers and internet. were very similar. Now, AI was a percent above, which is tangible, but it… it was… is in the same direction. The other interesting thing they found with that was, if you were to take the same thing and look at 2021 before ChatGPT was announced, all that, it looks exactly the same. So there’s also some question on whether… the AI piece is the catalyst to what’s going on, or if there are other factors that are in it. So… we kind of find ourselves in a peculiar place. So, the prevailing sentiment is the world’s changing, everything’s gonna change, all of this stuff’s happening, everybody’s running to it, you can’t have a conversation without AI. But then you have these through lines that are happening where nothing’s really changing, or foundational stuff still needs to happen, you still need to get your data right. Like, if you really look at the things you need to do to make AI work, it’s kind of the same things you need to do to make any tech work. So, that’s what this panel is going to discuss today, is these dynamics that are happening. And I have a great panel with extensive experience from the perspective of a Chief Revenue Officer. So, what I want to do is jump in and just do some brief introductions, company you work for. A little bit about yourself, and then, do you own sales, marketing, customer success? Which of the three do you own on the go-to-market side? I’m always interested, because a CRO has such a broad reach. Or a specific reach, depending on the company. James, do you mind starting us off?
James Roth:
Sure. Hey, Seth, always good to see you. I think the last time was, San Francisco a couple months ago. So, James Roth, I’m the CRO at ZoomInfo, and quick about me in the Washington, D.C. area, where I’m one of the few and the proud CROs, tech CROs in DC, but I technically, right now, have all go-to-market functions, with the exception of marketing. So we do have a CMO who’s a peer, but, sales, success, service, support, partnerships, new business, account management, all of the above, and then a great CMO counterpart.
SethMarrs:
Fantastic. Great. Kelly, why don’t you go to next?
Kelley Hippler:
Great, Seth, great to see you, and really appreciate being here today. So, Kelly Hipler spent 23 years of my career at Forrester Research, the final five, as CSO, where I oversaw both sales and customer success. Just spent 3 years at Briefly Legal as CRO, where I did have responsibility for sales, customer success. And marketing, and I’m just really excited to be here today from the Boston area, New England Patriots season ticket holder, so it feels like things are starting to turn back to normal, in the world here, so…
SethMarrs:
on the up.
Kelley Hippler:
Great conversation today. For sure.
SethMarrs:
Fantastic. Cool. Bill, how about you?
Bill Dwoinen:
Yeah, Seth, good to see you, and honored to be here. So, Bill Duoynan, Chief Revenue Officer at Mural. I’ve been at Mural, just under a year after 5 years at Slack and Salesforce, and I currently have, same as James. GTM from sales, customer success, new logo operations, and I, too, have a great CMO partner, and Kelly order is restored also here in Chicago, with the Bears being relevant again, so really good time here, this time of year.
SethMarrs:
Oh, this is really sad being a Chiefs fan. But… Congratulations. Alright, cool.
James Roth:
You’ve had a few good years, Seth.
SethMarrs:
Yeah.
Bill Dwoinen:
Yeah, yeah, go, yeah.
SethMarrs:
belt.
Christian:
Yeah, Seth, thanks for having me. Sorry, I think I missed the memo in the background. I was trying to figure out how I get those fancy backgrounds, so maybe I can figure that out in the call here. Christian Duran, I’m the CRO at StackAdapt. I’m based in the Seattle area. Similar to, it sounds like James and some others, I’m responsible for overseeing all sales across different segments, from enterprise, mid-market, and our, kind of different segments we have globally. We’re alive in multiple different countries around the globe. Also, all client services, including account management, our scaled services, data and analytics. We have a creative studio team. I also have RevOps and sales enablement functions in the organization. Not marketing. I have a great peer partner that’s at our CMO that is responsible for all things marketing, from event marketing, PR, product marketing, etc. That leads to that function today.
SethMarrs:
Fantastic. Awesome. Great to have you. Tyler, how about you?
Tyler John:
Hey guys, pleasure to be here. Tyler Sierra at Actively Christian. I’m from Seattle, but currently live in New York. I’ve spent the past decade, building go-to-market orgs at companies like Zenefits, Yelp, more recently Devon, and then at Actively, we are, primarily focused on top-down initiatives from boards, CEOs, and CROs in, transformation with AI, specifically within GoToMarket. So excited to share the stage with everyone here.
SethMarrs:
That’s good. Okay, so let’s… let’s jump into questions. First one, and Julia kind of talked about this, it was part of my predictions, efficiency or effectiveness? Which one of those is going to be the most important in 2026? So, Kelly, why don’t you… you start out? Like, what’s your thoughts?
Kelley Hippler:
Yeah, you know, Seth, I would definitely agree with you. From a CRO perspective, I think the effectiveness piece, which is really, you know, doing the right things versus, I think, of efficiency as, you know, doing things right. the CRO has to really set the course and make the trade-offs, make the decisions about what are you going to focus on or not, and then the efficiency comes into play, but I think especially in this day and age where there’s so much coming at teams, it really is important for the CRO to focus on the effectiveness, you know, what is our market opportunity, what’s our UVP, how are we best going to get there by targeting an ICP, and then think about how you use tools and things to get there and become more efficient. So, I certainly agree with effectiveness as being the order and setting the strategy and the course.
Bill Dwoinen:
Yeah.
SethMarrs:
Fantastic, fantastic. Bill, how about you?
Bill Dwoinen:
Yeah, first of all, how dare you make us choose between one or the other? It was, it was… tough one, right? It was… you didn’t give us a softball here, so I have to agree, and I wanna… I wanna peel… peel it out a little bit more as far as the importance of effectiveness. I think that’s always been important, right? Efficiency is, you know, I agree with the description where with effectiveness, what I’ve kind of gleaned is that a lot of the importance around being effective is just the speed in which things are moving, because if you miss You have to move fast, and so we have been, you know, we’ve been deep in data the last 4 or 5 months. For a plan for next year, and what I keep telling myself is we have to nail it, because you don’t have time to pivot. And things always move fast in our world, but now, just the pace of innovation, how fast you have to move, and you just have to get it right, and not that there’s not room for learning, because I love that about what we’re doing at Mural, is we’re moving fast and learning a ton, but there’s just things that we’re working on that we’re going so deep when you’re like, yeah, we… we can’t miss this. Like, there always have been big bets in what we do, like CROs calling their shots and making big bets, but in the pace in which we’re moving today is you just have to nail it. Then the efficiency part comes in.
SethMarrs:
Got it. Of course, the CRO… well, I’m in a CRO group, so it’s gonna be… I want both. So, which is… which is awesome.
Bill Dwoinen:
Like I said, shame on you for making us shoes, because it’s an impossible answer.
SethMarrs:
Christian, how about you?
Christian:
Yeah, I mean, I was gonna say, they’re definitely not mutually exclusive, right? But efficiency matters less if you’re not effective in what you’re going after and what you’re trying to solve, and if you’re not trying to solve customer problems or help customers grow. So if you had to choose, I’d say you gotta be more… I’d rather be more effective than ineffective and efficient, because then you’re not going to have much to show for that. So I think it’s… however, the more effective you get, you should drive some of those efficiencies, but if you want to continue to have bigger, more scaled impact, like, our sales bag at our company is constantly growing, so if you don’t learn how to get efficient. you can’t fit more stuff and more complexity in the sales bag, so we’re trying to leverage AI, you know, to make us more efficient. How do you knock down those kind of high-calorie, low-value processes so you can get more effective, know more about the customer, know more about their needs, know more about how you solve those problems so you can be more effective? But if you’re inefficient, you just can’t scale very well into those things, so I think they’re highly intercorrelated things that you gotta… you gotta solve for both. I think if you take your eye off one, then your ability to scale your business gets really limited. It’s great if you can be really effective with one customer, but if you can’t scale that out, it’s… you’re not gonna build a great business behind that.
SethMarrs:
Yeah, it’s a sense of theme. Barrier to entry is efficiency. The effectiveness is how you get… The multiple… the multiplier of gains. Well, what do you think, Tyler?
Tyler John:
Yeah, I’ll, I think maybe coming at this from the angle of what I’ve seen selling into revenue orgs with AI solution is that the, last year, a lot of companies were focused on efficiency. How do we get, like, more dials and more data in for teams to act on? Those teams now have everything at their fingertips, but their effectiveness with all of that data is hindered by the sheer amount of it that exists, as well as the differences in how humans actually reason through and execute on that data. So I think it’s the effectiveness in which teams are executing across data that will become a big, big trend, and already is in 26, where a seller that is mediocre, that has good systems of reasoning in place, is going to be able to outperform a seller that does not.
SethMarrs:
So you’re narrowing it, hey, on the data side is where you’re really going to be… if you use effectiveness on the data side, that’s going to be a big focal point. I think something you could relate to, James, like, how do you see this?
James Roth:
I mean, I think it’s… if I had to choose one or the other, I’d agree with effectiveness, but I do think the lens with which you apply each… I think one of the things that we’re seeing, and just a quick anecdote on our end, is, you know, I think everybody now has a great AI-driven account plan, point of view creation. What drives me insane is that then when the rep, hey, I’m meeting with Christian at StackAdapt, Christian’s a friend, like, what should I talk to him about? I just get the exact push button, here’s the account plan, and I’m like, that’s great, guys, I can do that too. I already have it. But what do you want me to do? Is this a relationship conversation? Am I, you know, do I want to, you know, elaborate on a certain product within StackAdapt? Whatever it may be, I think the effectiveness What I really don’t ever want to see happening is folks, you know, not taking the leverage from the efficiency they’re getting from AI, where they no longer have to go scan the world of information for an account plan, or look back through a bunch of manual calls, so on and so forth. But I need them to use that to be more effective in things like relationship building, in things like navigating the organization, in things like building executive alignment and multiple stakeholders. If they’re not leveraging that efficiency to become more effective in the stuff that makes sales folks great, then I think it’s a waste, and you just have great account plans and great points of view that never really get executed on. So I think it’s both, but I think it’s really picking your spots in where am I going to drive effectiveness, and then where… what can I do to drive efficiency, kind of in conjunction with one another.
SethMarrs:
It’s interesting, because basically, it’s, hey. Effectiveness or efficiency is going to raise the floor. I could raise the floor, so the sellers are gonna be a lot better than they were before, but it almost raises… it raises the bar again, because now you need to know what to do with this stuff, and how do you take the efficiencies you have and apply it to differentiate yourself? Because if you just do the same stuff that you have. And you’re average, like everybody else. you have no… you have no… there’s no differentiation, you’re kind of back in the same place you were before. Makes sense. Okay, so the age-long thing with sales is if I’m growing, and a lot of you on this call are growing rapidly. my way to grow is I need to add salespeople. So if I’m gonna grow by 15%, I need to increase my sales team by 15%. I think in 2025, this was challenged. It was challenged by a company, different sales teams, different organizations. So, for you guys, when you think about going into 2026, your growth numbers, how much of that is going to be consumed by you just making your sellers more efficient, so they can consume more revenue, versus I’ve got to do the traditional path that’s been in place forever, where I… I’m growing by 15%, so I need 4 headcount, I need 3 headcount. Bill, can you kick us off with that?
Bill Dwoinen:
Yeah, well, I came from… I mentioned I came from Salesforce that wrote the book on whatever you have to grow higher, right? And so those days, those days are over. I think it’s both. I’m gonna… I’m gonna actually go both, and I… but I think you do it in a more thoughtful way, and so the journey that we’re on is how do we unlock capacity within our current teams? Whether it’s where certain motions sit, where certain accounts sit, you know, we… we’re kind of one of those companies that went from having too many to not enough, and now we’re trying to find this middle ground. And you look for non-traditional paths, right? And so it’s a pretty popular, familiar motion that you all know, but we hired our first renewal manager, or we’re looking more for, you know, high-touch CSMs, you know, scaled CSM, and so it’s not necessarily saying, yeah, let’s go kind of use force to get to the goal, and just hire more, kind of, selling power. It’s how do we look at efficiencies throughout the process, because where could we plug the gaps? Like, we saw that a certain chord of our accounts just weren’t getting touched enough, and that’s a capacity thing. It’s not hiring more people, it’s just looking at the tools and resources amongst it. And then what I think is really, really powerful is you know, if you were activating a new logo motion, you know, you’d have to go through a 10K or listen to an earnings call to, you know, build a point of view and go on this long journey, and so some of the motions are being accelerated by AI, and so you can plan on faster time to impact for things like new logo motions, and so I think the answer is both. Like, you should always be looking at how to unlock capacity within your existing teams to free them up to do all the things we know that makes the sales magic happen, but not only looking at sales roles, you look at things like high-touch scaled CSMs, you look at renewal managers, just different ways to free people up to go do things.
SethMarrs:
So it sounds like, though, the way you just described it is you went efficiency first in terms of trying to… and you’ve maxed it now. So, you gained some capacity with it, but now you’re at the point where, yeah, my sellers are better than they were before, but I’m gonna… and I’ll still be able to grow them, but I’m gonna need more sellers in order to… because I’ve got.
Bill Dwoinen:
Yeah.
SethMarrs:
I’m maxed out.
Bill Dwoinen:
So, yeah, so what we… our approach at Mural is go fast, test, go faster. So we, you know, go fast to hire a renewal manager or a scaled CSM, we test it, and then we go even faster when it’s kind of proven out, and so this year, we proved out a lot of those things. Like, we’re not at the size to say. you know, if I was still at Slack, well, yeah, let’s go hire 15 renewal managers and build a team, now it’s like, let’s… one or two, let’s test it, and I think one of the biggest things that we’ve seen is the activation of a true new logo motion. And, you know, we tried that with one or two reps, it worked really well, double downing there, and so we’ve done things kind of in silos to test them a bit, and now it’s like, alright, we’re gonna kind of roll this out at more of a scale, because we’ve proven it out, and it goes back to. we have to get it right, and then we can focus on the efficiency. And so there’s things we wanted to prove out this year, but then the biggest thing, too, is just capacity. You know, the days of mid-market or emerging teams having 80, 90 accounts is when growth was happening organically because teams were getting bigger. You could have, you know, mid-market type teams with a lot of accounts, because they really were just managing renewals, but now growth is not coming from, you know, existing teams growing, so you truly have to even have an outbound motion within those sorts of teams, and so you have to free them up, because a lot of companies depended on, you know, James’ team got bigger year over year, and so I’m gonna grow them, and that’s not a theme we’re seeing across the board.
SethMarrs:
Christian, how’s it… how’s that… how’s that sit with you, what… what Bill just talked about?
Christian:
Yeah, I think some similarities. I mean, for us at our stage, we’re still so early in our global kind of TAM that we’re going after that you need bodies to get after it as well. So we’re hiring hundreds of people this year and next year. to make sure you have coverage, but then within that, I mean, as you’re trying to build your business in a highly effective and profitable business, you’re trying to create leverage in your P&L, and if you’re growing your expenses, you know, as fast or faster than revenue, not good, right? So you’re trying to make sure you create that operating leverage. And if we look at our ramp sellers, like, they’ve more than 2X’d their quota, what they’re able to cover each year in their targets, and there’s still room for that, because if you actually start to pull apart the process from, like, lead to cash of what’s going on from, like, the initial prospecting to collecting the money, there is still an inordinate amount of time in our business when you pull apart these, like. filling out a 250-question RFI, you know, security questionnaire. Like, a lot of that stuff, you answer it the same way every time. Like, should that take somebody 8 hours to do, or should it take them, like, 8 minutes to do, right? Or… translating media plans to IOs to putting them in the system. There are so many of those processes that can have a lot of automation and drive efficiency that we’re working on that across the board. We’re looking at every step of that journey and saying. where is the most value and drag and friction in the process, so you can repurpose that time and continue to increase the amount of capacity a rep has. There is, I think, you know, at every year, some ceilings of what you can just handle cognitively. And you also gotta still make sure you’re servicing the customer well enough, and I think for us, it also varies by customer type. You know, in our world, in advertising, there’s some things you can do very automated. Like, if you’re buying Google Search, you know, you can do that kind of on your own, to a very large degree. When you’re buying programmatic, while all very automated. when you’re working with an agency, it’s still a very high-touch business, and still a high-trust business. People are still buying people, I would say, in this business, and they’re trying to navigate a world of 15,000 vendors in our Loomiscape, so that that time with customers is important. So we want to make sure we’re creating that time by reducing all those, you know. painful processes I talked about, and friction, get those things done faster. Automate, you know, your leads, your prospecting with AI, SDRs, etc. How do you… take those parts out, give more time back, and that will allow more effectiveness, efficiency, but you can also scale the amount of coverage and capacity everybody has. And then you gotta figure out where that ceiling is, where it starts to break, because there’s probably a point of diminishing return in that. But we definitely got to do both right now.
SethMarrs:
So, you mentioned operating leverage. Are you able to talk a little bit? Are you seeing operating leverage go favorable? So, you’re still hiring, but you’re hiring at better operating leverage? You’re starting to see that dial, like, kind of turn a little bit, where you’re getting better operating leverage, even though you’re still hiring, due to all.
Christian:
Yeah, for sure.
SethMarrs:
You just talked about.
Christian:
Yeah, I’d say from a couple ways. One, the existing or more ramp sellers getting more efficient, and then the accelerating the onboarding and ramp of your new sellers so that that time to pay back or efficiency doesn’t take as long as it used to. How can you get them in a faster start, a higher early impact index in the company? So if you can do both of those things, you’re going to create operating leverage a lot faster, you know, than we did, I’d say, historically.
SethMarrs:
Yeah. Tyler, do you think about it from an operating leverage standpoint? Like, what’s your perspective on how do I grow, but also grow in these two pathways, where I’m trying to be more efficient, but also I’m not gonna… I’m not gonna cap my growth due to hiring? Like, how do you see that? Like, how do you think about it?
Tyler John:
Well, there’s two answers to that question. So, I mean, actively a Series A company, hypergrowth, all I can think about is get, you know, great talent in, and please the board, you know? So, I think we are not at that scale, but a lot of what Christian said really resonates with me in terms of, I think a lot of… A lot of the market, at least that we are seeing, is starting to apply productivity increases to their teams, and there’s a good way to do this and a bad way to do it. A good way is, you do the experimentation, you have a hypothesis, we can reduce, time to… time to… I mean, not time to ramp, we can reduce time to prospect per account for an SDR from 2 hours to 30 minutes. Let’s go out and prove that out over 6 months, and then apply a lift to the entire org, and build that into your plan. The bad way to do it, and we see some companies, maybe not the bad way, but the more risky way to do this is you actually sign up for that number. We’re going to hire a VP of AI and go-to-market engineering, and they are going to deliver a 20% lift next year. I think that is a risky, it’s a great path to go down as a, I’m going to hire you so you can find the 20% increase next year, but bad to say, I’m going to hire you and you must lift 20% next year.
SethMarrs:
Right? People weren’t talking about that a year ago.
Tyler John:
Yeah, yeah, and even… even to the point where we have, we’re dealing with, teams that are saying, look, we have a 30% productivity increase quota over our heads that aren’t… they are, they are technical. Which is another way of, of kind of looking at how you’re actually applying, quote-unquote, like, quota within a revenue org.
SethMarrs:
Got it, got it. James, you have a… you have a different… you have a perspective, like, you and I, like, I’ve been in conversations with you where you’ve been talking about, like, you’ve pretty much had to reinvent this process over, like, in… in the time that you’ve… that you’ve been there. How do you see this? I mean, is it operating leverage? Like, in… in the… where you are in your business model, and where the company is today, like, how… how’s this a little bit different for you, or some of the things that may be nuanced that you’re dealing with that maybe, like, the fast startups. And some of the other industries aren’t dealing with.
James Roth:
I mean, for us, just going back 2-3 years, we had a… world-class SMB inbound motion, and I think it got to the point where… For sure. hyper-efficient, and everything was about sales efficiency, and how do we, like, just… if you imagine a world where you had 90% of your business coming inbound. in combination of ZERP, and acquisitions, and great market timing, greatest tech bull market of all time, all the things, it was all about efficiency, and I think as we got to a certain period with that, our SMB business got too big, and anybody that’s in a scale-up, you know, getting to $100 million in SMB is great. Because the renewal rate, you know, call it industry standard, 65-70% renewal rate in a… or annualized net retention in SMB, you can sell more new business to still be a growth business. Once you get to four or five hundred million bucks. You know, the math just doesn’t work as well in your favor, especially with a macro environment that’s less good for SMBs. And so we… we had to change the tires at 80 miles an hour, and we had to shift our business upmarket, both on new business and on account management, very quickly. And I think from an efficiency versus an effectiveness standpoint, and a lot of similarities with Bill’s side. you know, you don’t just say you’re gonna go move upmarket, right? You don’t just decide that one day and say, well, we’re just gonna go do a billion dollars in enterprise business. Easy.
SethMarrs:
You hope not.
James Roth:
And so there was, you know, unfortunately, it was set to, like, a one-size-fits-all, so our upmarket was very much pushed towards efficiency as well, and so we had our enterprise account managers with 30, 40 accounts. And within those 30, 40 accounts, when you think back to the good times. what Bill said is you get a run rate renewal that’s just gonna grow 20%, because that’s what was happening. You wanted more renewals out there. And so, we had an, one of our strategic enterprise reps, she’s outstanding, she had 40 accounts, and one of those accounts was Cisco. They had 35 active agreements with us. Because in the old days, you wanted each of those individual BUs or agreements, they’re all gonna grow, so why not have 35 expirations? If you think about really moving up market, and to Bill’s point, capacity and… you’ll never be a great enterprise account manager if you’re dealing with 40 renewals within one of your 40 accounts. And so, you know, we had quite a bit of work to do. Where early days as an investment case is incremental, like, yes, we needed renewals teams, we needed to lower account loads, we had to get strategic enterprise down to 3 to 5, we had to get our enterprise growth segment down from 50 to 10, and so that was the name of the game for 2 years, and I think we’ve gotten it to a much better place, and this is all public. We announced in our Q3, we’re at, like, 73… percent of our business is now upmarket, and it’s close to a billion dollars, and, you know, again, the math just works in your favor. That’s a net retention of 100 plus. And so we’re still in the journey. I think from the, do you hire more people? I think with how big our GTM is, it’s an exercise in pragmatism, where in the SMB, what can I do via offshore, what can I do via, you know, certain AI tools to say, okay, we’re gonna have a smaller function supporting this SMB motion, both on new business and on the account management side and on the support side, and then how do I go reinvest those dollars into the upmarket motion? And, you know, I think, Tyler, to your point, what’s challenging maybe I got a meaner board than you do, but if I were to say, hey, we’re gonna hope this 20% happens, and so we’re gonna, you know, hire the VP of AI and all this other stuff. you know, we’ve basically gotten to a point where, because of everything out there, from a tooling perspective and a motion perspective, there’s… I don’t think there’s ever been more noise in the space. there’s some amazing products out there, but we basically do require our BU leaders, if you want this thing, you know, we just went through an exercise, and I thought she was going to join with Hannah from Nooks, and it’s basically like, okay, like, our SDR and that team, that leadership, which rolls up into my group, I said, what are you going to sign up for? Because this is an incremental spend, and I get it. Anecdotally, it makes a ton of sense, but what are you going to sign up for? Because we don’t just have unlimited money cheat codes to buy every tool out there that we think is going to integrate and work, and maybe make a partnership, and so on and so forth, but I think the way that we think about it is saving the dollars where we can save the dollars via hyper-efficient motions, both with AI and with offshoring, or just better support, if you will, and then investing those dollars into not only sales capacity, but as you move up market with a more technical… I think a lot of us are in the same boat, where more technical product, weaving AI into our own products, cost of sale goes up, because now you’re paying the AI companies, everybody’s using the same ones, by the way, so everybody’s cost of sale is going up, so it’s very challenging to just say, hey, we’re not only going to buy all this stuff internally, then we’re also going to build on all this AI internally, and we’re going to hire a lot more people. And, you know, being in the public markets, they don’t love when you change margins, and so you always have to be able to find it, and then make a bet on what is this going to do to upmarket net retention, what is this going to do to upmarket new business. So, it is a large exercise that I think kind of takes a couple flavors from both sides of the Efficiency, effectiveness, and… You know, placing the bet, if you will.
SethMarrs:
Yeah. I mean, the thing that resonated with me that you said was, it’s not a matter of, I need to go higher, or I need to go be more efficient, it’s where do I place my bets in the year, and where do I also look where my bets didn’t pay off the year before, and take that money and move that money somewhere else, or where my business is evolving. And what used to work doesn’t work anymore, so it’s a constant set of shifting your bets, rather than one or the other, if I understand.
James Roth:
100%. Yep. Cool.
SethMarrs:
So… Kelly, I got to see you in hypergrowth mode. So, just for those of you on the call, we hit COVID, things went crazy, and then at Forester, you were leading the charge as we had the greatest year ever in Forrester’s history, so you were in hypergrowth mode. That was 2021. So, think about, like, if I think about that today compared to what you’re doing in terms of trying to get more from your sales team versus hiring. How’s that evolved? Like, how are you dealing with that today?
Kelley Hippler:
Yeah, and thank you, Seth, and I will say, you know, a lot of it came from the great frameworks. I was like a kid in a candy store with the research that we had access to at Forester, and one of the disciplines that I’ve still maintained to this day is building a bottoms-up plan for the sales organization, and with that, building in whatever productivity assumptions that we have, and so not just, hey, we’re gonna get 10% more, but I think I could get 2% on pricing, and if we do this tool, maybe we can get 1%, and actually documenting out, exactly what bets you’re placing, what productivity you expect to get from it. which also helps when you go to roll out quotas and whatnot, because I think at the end of the day. If your sales team is not maxed out, and if you don’t have best-in-class rep success rates, the best thing you can do to shore up your organization is to help make the people you currently have on board more successful, so they make more money, they delight your clients, and you stay, and that’s when the flywheel goes. Oftentimes, it does require a combination of enhancing the productivity of your existing team and bringing new people on board. but I think we all know there’s a lot of risk involved with making new hires, because some will be successful, some won’t. There’s a huge time lag, and again, it sounds like a lot of folks are really focused on compressing that time to productivity, but that puts a lot of pressure on a budget as well, and so I definitely encourage people to start first, but actually build a bottoms-up, you know, plan. I think it also helps you when you then have to get in front of the sales force. course at kickoff and explain to them where their numbers came from, when you can actually break down where those productivity assumptions came from, and they see that you’re committed to wanting them all to be successful, to get to their numbers more quickly, and so I start with the productivity piece first, and then go to the headcount to fill the gap from there.
SethMarrs:
So it’s pragmatic, right? Because everyone’s going to get an insane top-down number, and you’ve got to find your way to it, so by doing bottom-up, it allows you… I mean, if I understood it right, it’s, hey, I’m going to put 2% in new headcount, because new headcount can drive this much more in growth, and I can get 2% more in efficiencies by doing X, Y, and Z. So you’re pragmatically walking into the plan. Now, whether that works or not, that’s always how the things come out during the year. But when you start with the bottoms up, it allows you to state, here’s where I need new headcount, here’s where I can gain efficiencies. Are you seeing that rotate at all, where now you’re able to get more from efficiency versus more from hiring?
Kelley Hippler:
Yeah, I think it’s definitely leaning a little bit more towards efficiency, and I would also say, you know, team members are even more open to taking on a higher quota if they know that there are more tools and information that they can have access to, and feel more confident that they can win in the market, and that’s why I think it’s great when you can sort of share with the team and with your leaders what your thinking is to help make sure that you have that buy-in. But then also the caveat being to really focus on a few high-impact changes, because there’s only so much a team can absorb, while you’re also, you know, I always talk about the fact sales is always on the clock, and so there is only so much you can throw at people, so you do want to be realistic, and I think that has come out in this conversation as well. But involving the team in those conversations, letting them know, hey, I’m making this trade-off, and then hopefully you can give a little bit more in terms of, you know, OT increases, etc. To your sellers for driving more productivity, and you make it a win-win.

SethMarrs:
Got it, got it, okay. Alright, so I’m gonna shift us a little bit, and this is somewhat of a… it’s an interesting conversation of where I think a lot of this change is happening, and that’s to the frontline leader. So… When you think about, like, what AI is doing, a perspective that I’ve had, and I’m really interested in getting your take on it, is the frontline leader’s probably going to be more impacted by what’s going on with AI, things like increased span of control, all sorts of different things, than the frontline seller. So, when you think about what’s gonna change in the frontline seller’s role in 2026, like, how are you guys thinking about what that’s… first off, what do you think that’s gonna look like, and how are you guys looking at managing that into 2026?
Bill Dwoinen:
Christian, you mind starting us off?
Christian:
Yeah, no, I think this is an important one, because the role, I think, does start to shift, and our expectations for frontline managers should shift. And what I mean by that is, you know, today, if you think about the role of a frontline manager, there are these you know, walking libraries of institutional knowledge on processes. What happened with this customer a year ago? Like, how do I do this thing or that thing? It’s a lot of the what, often, and probably not enough of the how. And I think a lot of frontline managers are more of a player-coach role versus, like, a true coach or exec kind of coach. And I see that being the ideal shift where a lot of the information, a lot of that what, from the knowledge transfer, how do I do this process, how do I learn about how to do something in Salesforce through, you know, WalkMe AI, or whatever it might be. How does that knowledge transfer shift directly to the seller, and the manager is more, really, of that coach, and the sensemaker, and kind of more of the art of things, like the… the AI will also help the manager know where to focus energy in coaching faster, right? Like, today, sometimes you wait till the end of the quarter, you’re seeing the signal, like, oh, why are you missing target? Why are you missing target? Or you can only attend so many calls. coaching is becoming more like an always-on, continuous thing because of the signal that you can start to get. Like, we use Gong, for example, and you can plug in your medic training, like, why do you only identify pain in 10% of your calls? Those that do more, better, like, and you can give really instantaneous feedback. And then you can make sense of just a lot of the noise, too. Like, AI starts to deliver a lot. But it’s like, here’s 20 insights on Zoom info with James. Like, well, which ones matter? And James kind of mentioned this before, like, what do you want me to do? Or is James really the decision maker, or is somebody else the decision maker? I know this title AI is saying this is the decision maker, but it’s maybe somebody else, and so I think they can help them find those cues, and really think about the behavioral things of the sales motion a little bit more. And, you know, spend less time on just the process details, and talk more about execution and strategy, and how to go to market differently, and how to build that kind of emotional resilience in their sellers, and that grit of how to persevere through. the sales motion build their confidence because they have more at their disposal at their fingertips for the what? Like, make that feel less overwhelming, like, it’s right in front of you now, it’s easier to get access to, it takes you less time. So you can come into a call Way more prepared than ever if you’re doing those things, which before, sellers, whether they didn’t have the time or got lazy, just like it took a lot of effort. now you can come in and really focus your energy on, like, how do I help you drive a successful conversation with a customer, overcome those objectives? So I think it’s just… I think the coaching moves more from that what to that how, and all… while coaching should be always on, I think you didn’t have enough signal to be as effective as always on in real time as much as you can going forward.
SethMarrs:
Yeah, that monthly ride-along you do, and you just blurt out everything that you think they need to improve based on what you saw with them that day has now changed, where you have so much signal that you have to start filtering out the signal from the noise to understand what I should coach on to be able to be successful, rather than trying to find it.
Christian:
Yeah, some of these tools out there now are letting you, get self-coaching in the moment, right? You can even create your own prompts as a seller, like, you know, to do your own kind of coaching. There’s some tools that are doing those things, so it’s just… it’s getting a lot, a lot more effective for managers to make sure they can use these tools to increase that… Where to focus their energy, where are the opportunity areas, and probably in the past, you only could see, like, the tip of the iceberg. Now you can just get a lot more, which is… allows you to be a better coach, and allows that individual to succeed faster, because if you have a seller that goes a couple quarters without hitting target, you couldn’t really figure out why. It’s too late to course correct that. Now you can help fix that problem for the company and that individual to be more successful earlier on if you’re leveraging those capabilities. So it’s good for the company, it’s good for the individual, because you can make them better at their job a lot quicker.
SethMarrs:
Yeah, it makes sense. Tyler, you’re running with your hair on fire right now, just trying to keep up with growth. Like, where does the sales manager even factor in? Are you even thinking about them? Or, like, where does a sales manager for a frontline seller fit in in your world today?
Tyler John:
It’s not quite on fire yet. Hopefully it won’t be, but I think, you know, I get most excited about this topic, because you, you know, in solving for the ICs, you inherently are, like, replacing a core function of a frontline leader. Like, as a CRO, you want your sellers to do PG, you want them to qualify deals, you want them to execute effectively within those deal cycles. You have your frontline leaders to push PG, inspect PG, like, run MedPick, forecast calls, like, do all the qualification, join them on deals, but I actually don’t, like, I was on a forecast call the other day with a leader, and I just prompted our instance, like, you know, will this deal close? What are the risks? And we’ve developed it far enough that I actually, like, have a strong degree of confidence in what it spits out, and it saved me, like. man, four years ago, as a leader, I was listening to my reps’ gong calls before forecast calls, so I didn’t get, like, reamed by my CRO, and you don’t need to do that today, and so what does that change for a frontline leader? I think they have more capacity to do things like recruit, they’re gonna have more capacity to coach people on how to effectively use AI, and I think probably the most immediate thing is they should have more capacity to manage more people, which really helps as you’re scaling a revenue org. So, what’s very top of mind to me is, like, how do I, how do I eliminate the need for managers to have their own, like, institutional knowledge and focus, and how do I deliver a unified front that lifts all reps and gives more capacity to the managers?
SethMarrs:
A lot more systemic than it used to be, where you’re trying to get your leaders to kind of almost compete against each other to try to figure out a way to win. Interesting. James, you had talked about the… oh, sorry, what were you gonna say, Tyler?
Tyler John:
I don’t know about the… I mean, sales is a competition, but I think it’s… I think it’s…
SethMarrs:
Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean.
Tyler John:
was less about that, but just the hours that I had spent in, you know, rolling out methodologies or coaching and developing managers that could be assisted by AI, I think I’m looking forward to.
SethMarrs:
Got it, got it. So, James, you… you talked about how you’re shifting, kind of, the organization, like, in moving different resources, applying resources to different parts, disinvesting in some areas, investing in others. How does that affect the frontline… how will that affect the frontline seller in 2026, when you’re… as you’re making those strategic changes?
James Roth:
Yeah, I mean, I think it opens up… the first thing you always have to be cognizant of is if you’re… Sort of shrinking certain areas, like, what is the career path? for that area, and I just had a roundtable, we’ve got, you know, call it 500 SDRs in my org, and I… Got 100 of them here, did a roundtable, and if you’re shrinking the size of your SMB team, that’s the most logical place to jump up, if you will, to get into a closing role, or whatever it may be. So I think making sure you keep those paths available, where it’s like, do I want to move into SDR leadership? Do I want to move into AE? Do I want to move into AM? Do I want to move into a renewals group? I think… When sales falls apart is when your people don’t know what they have to go deliver on, and what is next. And I think if it feels like a very myopic view of what is next, where I have to go do this thing, I have to be a manager of SDRs, I don’t really want to do that. And then I think that in my head, I think that there’s less SMB AE roles, because we went from 330 down to 200, what do I do? And that’s when they start responding to inbound on LinkedIn. So I think step one, and then I’ve got somewhat of a contrarian take on the frontline manager in general, I think step one is just to make sure whatever that org looks like, whether you’re in hypergrowth, whether you’re large, established, etc. is make sure that in any sales role, in any management role, they know exactly what that next step is, and yeah, if you’re a senior director and you’re waiting for a VP, you might have to wait a couple years until someone gets promoted or they move on to go be CRO somewhere else. If you’re an SDR, you should have, like, in every 90 days, there’s a milestone where you get to make a little bit more money, or change a TSR1 to 2 on your LinkedIn, whatever it may be. And that’s something that we’ve had to do in Overdrive, just because we’ve shifted what was, like, a basic, come in, be an SDR, you go inbound, then you go outbound, then you move up market, outbound, and then you jump to AE. And it was, like, 9 months, because we were hiring so many of them, so, like. that was just the fundamental shift, if you will, and I think making sure that you have, we called it project ladder, it’s like, every single role knows what is next, whether that’s in leadership or in IC land to move upmarket, or do you want to just make a bunch of money down market? It’s all good, if you’re great. on the frontline manager, you know, I think I’ve always seen, I’m not sure if you all have seen, there was always this trade-off. And even when I get headhunters call in, and they’re like, hey, do you know this person? I always had to vet, like, are you looking for a traditional sales leader? Are you looking for an operational rigor, sort of more look at the machine type? There were trade-offs, and I think there are very few. and they’re amazing, that have the ability to go have the locker room, also drive sales, jump in on a deal, build a relationship, but also then manage the machine, operational rigor, rev ops, so on and so forth. And I think you’ve had to make those trade-offs, especially at a frontline manager level. That’s where everybody starts. And so, in the past, I’ve had the folks where I’m, you know, everybody says, you don’t want to be a super rep, you don’t want to be the player coach, you’re a manager now, you’re coaching, you’re developing, you’re training, but then some of the most successful frontline managers are the ones that just have the ability to go play super rep on more deals. And I think the trade-off now, in a more efficient, a lot of AI-driven, like, you don’t have to have that data junkie, could play RevOps, could play frontline manager, operational rigor, so much of that is now automated. If you want to see what is win rate versus ASP, are my reps holding out too long for ASP that they’re not going to get, it’s crushing win rate. Click a button, and you’ll see it for your entire team. If you wanted to… I forget who made the point on conversational intelligence. you know, we went from, reps, then forecast to manager, then manager, forecast to directors, directors for… like, the amount of time going through the same call over and over and over again, where now I get a better, real-time answer with all of the first-party data, all of the third-party data, every signal that’s happening. I trust that way more than I trust an SVP of sales rolling up, what’s gonna happen with this particular deal. And so we’ve been able to shorten that timeframe quite a bit, and put a lot, like, when I started at ZoomInfo years ago. You know, we had an operational rigor machine monster running as COO, and he was amazing, and I learned so much from that, because it was like, I started as more of a traditional sales guy, sales leader, and I learned very quickly that I was going to have to build that muscle, and now all the stuff that I went through in those few years. it’s all click of a button, and it’s the right answer, and it’s on time, and I don’t have to be an Excel jockey, I don’t have to understand how to go build a Tableau report myself. It’s all there, and it’s all automated, and it’s all done by very simple prompts, like dumb prompts. So, I think… my contrarian take, then I’ll shut up, sorry. Is that the frontline manager can be a role where now you no longer have to push the, you know, always coaching, and you’re developing all your people, like, so much of the machine can do that. I’m actually pushing the frontline managers, and I think this is size-specific. You know, if you have second line, if you have third line, those people should be thinking about the machine, those people should be thinking about the comp plan and the incentive structure, so on and so forth. Frontline managers, I kind of want to get back to the old days of just being like, player coach, you are in the deals, you are driving deals, and now you’ve got a clear deck without having 5 hours of forecast calls every week. I want you on every meeting. And my last take there is that.
Bill Dwoinen:
If you’re not on every meeting.
James Roth:
How are you going to understand what the product market fit is? How are you going to understand what the reps are doing well? Like, there is so much, I feel like there was a big push to get people more into, like, the executive leadership role, which basically means further from the customer. If you look at great executives, I guarantee everybody on this call has been on at least 15 customer calls this week, because how else would you know anything? Going into the board meeting without being on customer calls. So, in closing. More time, more efficient, offload a bunch of the stuff that took many hours, get back in front of the customers, and drive… Sales.
SethMarrs:
I mean, basically, focus more on the people. Like, take the capacity to gain, focus more on the people, make sure they’re set up for success in the future, and then do what you do best, go help win deals. It kind of makes it… Gotcha. Kelly, how do you think about this? Like, what’s your perspective, having listened to a few people talk about it?
Kelley Hippler:
Yeah, no, absolutely, and I would agree sort of where Christian started this, you know, with us, and, you know, on the whole piece around the coaching, because I do think, you know, I’ve seen stats that win rates are down to, like, 18%, you know, probably an all-time low, and so I think it does necessitate having managers closer to the deals, working with the reps, coaching the reps, in order for them to be successful. And if you think about the fact that sales teams are either largely staying the same or getting smaller, it makes it that much more important that every seller you have be impactful when they’re out in the field or when they’re in front of somebody. So I do think, you know, focusing on that coaching and development is super critical, and to the point that James just made, the good news is a lot of the work around, hey, there was a spreadsheet outside of the CRM system that I had to fill out for 5 hours a week because the CRM couldn’t give us what we wanted. A lot of that has been alleviated, and repurposing that time to get back in the trenches, to be out front, hearing what customers and, and your, you know, prospective buyers are saying, is invaluable, and that’s really where first-line managers should be focused moving forward.
SethMarrs:
So if I… if I understand it, like, it’s not necessarily… less frontline managers, but I’m shifting the role of a frontline manager to do more on the people side, more on the deal side, than it is… I’m just gonna… so, from one perspective, it’s not necessarily more span of control, it’s more depth that I want from the capacity that we’re getting.
Kelley Hippler:
I think at least to start, and then sort of when you get to a point where you feel like your team is as close to maximized, or the majority of your reps are getting to or above plan, that you might want to explore expanding that, but I think just sort of saying, hey, now you don’t have to do all this reporting, so we’re going to double the number of folks that you have, we’ll be back in the same place where, on a per-rep basis, the amount of time the manager’s spending hasn’t incrementally increased, and I think that’s probably the point of biggest. lever and opportunity to drive performance that folks have. So, I think over time, maybe slightly, but I wouldn’t be all in on saying, oh, we just got rid of this, so let’s double your span of control, because then I think you’re going to be right back where you started with, and, you know, from a per-rep basis.
SethMarrs:
Got it. Okay, so, Bill, take us home on this one. Like, span of control, you’re gonna have a whole bunch of reps that are reporting on one manager or defs? Like, how do you sit? Like, where does this sit with you?
Bill Dwoinen:
Yeah, I would say depth, and I think kind of bringing it back to the whole, you know, evolution of the frontline manager, I’ll put it in two buckets, and I’ll be brief. I think it’s two things. I’ll keep the answer into… unrelated to AI, related to AI, is I think we’re in this, like, true leadership moment. Like. the death of the manager, right? That managed the spreadsheets and, you know, managed one-on-one cadences. It’s like, we are in this leadership moment where leaders truly have to lead from the front, whether it’s being in front of the business, being in front of customers. The, like, it just seems like it’s way more fun to be a frontline leader, because you’re not doing all that. You’re not in spreadsheets, you’re not doing all those things, and so I really think, whether it’s the market, the pace in which we’re moving, that people, you know, there’s some folks in their career never had to go generate demand, right? Like. People need to be coached and skilled, and we’re in this kind of just leadership moment, and we’re seeing leaders just rise to the top, and the managers just kind of… you know, the job passing them by, and James kind of opened me up here for this one, but bring back the sales manager, right? We’ve shied away from that title of, you know, the culture I grew up in at CareerBuilder.com back in the day was people got in the leadership so they can go meet with more customers. Like, that was the fun part of the job, is like, I’m gonna get the opportunity to be more in front of more customers, and so, you know, because of AI, because of all the intelligence, like, you’re just smarter. You don’t need a report from RevOps to form an opinion about the business. Like, you can look and predict risk, you can do very one-on-one prompting. We created cheesy but amazing. We created something called a pick crew. It’s our prompt intelligence team, and so it’s a team of people across different functions that came up with our go-to prompts for the org on how to understand your customers, how to predict risk, and so there’s just, like, V1 things you can do to free people up, and so, you know, leaders need to be spending time with customers and be in front of the business. Well, of course. especially in more of the mid-market scale type businesses, you have to empower your teams to be able to go out there and do it, but it’s bring back the sales manager. I think people have really shied away from just saying. I’m in sales. Like, I’m pretty darn proud of saying, I’m in sales, even as a CRO. Like, our… our best people and our teams are great, but our executive team, from CEO to CPO to chief customer officer, they’re in front of clients every day, and so when we do have board meetings, we are in planning, there’s not this, like, scurry of running to the account teams. To go do that, and so just all this great stuff that’s happening with AI allows you to be in front of customers more, and also just form a more intelligent opinion about the business, because traditionally, as a frontline leader. you would really wait for someone to help you form an opinion, whether it was RevOps, or especially at larger companies, the engine of resources you have, and now you don’t have to wait. you know, you don’t know… I lived in spreadsheets most of my time at LinkedIn, and I hope I never have to be in a spreadsheet again for anything. I mean, that won’t happen, but, it is… it is the… it is time to be leaders, and truly lead the business, and to be in front of it, and don’t shy away from being the original title… title of leader, which is a sales manager. Like, be out there in the field. and be in front, owning these relationships, and the power of AI, and the capacity it fills up. is two things. Number one is, like, you can spend more time doing it. Number two is you can sound way more intelligent. Like, it’s not hard for me to jump into a meeting and sound like I’m an investor in the company, you know, with all the information we have in front of us.
SethMarrs:
And so it seems like a pretty utopian view of what this stuff is gonna do, which is not common when we’re talking about AI, and it seemed to be across the board with this group, which is awesome. Okay, so we only have a few minutes left. What I’d like to do is just, if you guys could keep it to one minute, just the most important skill going into 2026 that your sellers are going to need. Just, like, what is that skill that you think, if they’re going to be successful, they’re going to do this? So, James, can you start us off?
James Roth:
Sure, one minute. I think we’ve touched on it somewhat, but just the volume that we’re getting back face-to-face with our customers, the ability to build relationships, to build rapport. I think from 2020 to 2024, that was the thing that was lost. is that, like, I’m personally friends with Bill at this point, I’m personally friends with Christian at this point, and that’s coming from just meetings that we’ve had. Like, I didn’t know them prior to this role, and I think the ability to actually be a great sales professional was lost, because you had this amazing market, you had the inbound, you had the point-click and go, and I think all of the AI tools can take care of a lot of the things that made great sellers great. Account planning, read the 10K, all the things that Bill talked about. And I think having that in your bag, with the addition of going back to being a great salesperson, building a great relationship, jumping on a plane, getting in front of your customer, especially upmarket. I think that’s gonna be a muscle that has to be rebuilt, and the folks that have it are gonna excel and do very, very well.
SethMarrs:
Yeah, I mean, in-person’s cool again, to a certain extent, right? So, Kelly, how about you? What do you think?
Kelley Hippler:
Yeah, and I, you know, to piggyback on James, I think in order to be effective when you’re in person, I think it really comes down to understanding and knowing your customer’s business truly, and not spending your time prepping to go in to talk about yourself. you know, your buyers are already going to know probably more about your product than you may in some cases, depending upon how senior a seller is, so really using the tools and the information that you have to go in and be educated about your buyers, their likely pain points, and how you can help them solve a problem, not how you can sell a product, will lead to building those relationships and trusts that lead to ongoing business. So I really think that education Peace is gonna be so important.
SethMarrs:
So the game… the game doesn’t change, but now that you are able to better educate yourself, you need to do more to find unique insights from that better education to be able to win. Right. Okay. Bill, how about you?
Kelley Hippler:
Don’t wait.
Bill Dwoinen:
Yeah, so I’m, I’m traditionally a rule follower, Seth, so you might not invite me back, but I’m gonna go with two. And, I’ll kind of summarize the things that everyone’s saying. It’s really… it’s back to the basics, right? Like, what… with what demand from the pen… I’m sorry, what demand from the… pandemic did was allow you to skip steps in an authentic sales process. And so, you know, for me, it’s two things. It’s not only being in person, and it’s crazy we have to say that, of like. You know, go stalk your customers where they’re speaking, or all the things that, kind of, people grew up doing. And so, it’s not only being in person, but we are just rigorous about customer discovery. And when I walk into meetings, like, we have such a passionate… I’m sure we all do, like, people that use the product love it, and so when I go into meetings. right away, they’re like, oh my gosh, we love Mural. I’m like, I don’t care. What are you focused on? What are your problems? You know, what are two or three things that you’re doing to stay relevant in your market? And so, really just going deep with discovery, so you can tie what you’re selling to something bigger, right? What scares me more than anything is when you hear someone say, oh, the users love using our product. I’m like, -oh, wait, we need more than that. And so this all ties to the fact that you just can no longer skip a step. in a sales process, and you have to run a true, true cycle from deep discovery to value realization to then actually closing and asking the hard questions. So I just gave you 7 answers, Seth, so I apologize about that, but I stuck to the minute. But it’s just, you run authentic sales processes, and you can’t skip a step along the way.
SethMarrs:
But the discovery side’s really important, right? Because that’s actually unearthing things that you can’t prep for. So ideally, you prep as much as possible, but you get more value for the customer and for yourself from the discovery. Awesome, okay. Christian.
Christian:
Yeah, I would say, like, one of the key things is, well, you gotta learn how to use these new tools in AI, like, if you don’t know how to do it as well as your peers, you’re gonna be behind, because you’re gonna lose that efficiency and the effectiveness and all the stuff we talked about, right? So I think it’s a mandate that everybody in your organization learns how to get the full potential out of it, but I would say it’s important that you learn how to keep being human. in this new world, to re… to build relationships and trust what everybody else is talking about, right? Like, knowing AI is wrong, when to overrule it, when it’s not personalized enough. Because you still have to go build trust, and understand customer problems, and do discovery, things that… this is not going to solve all those problems, right? So you still got to make sure you’re a human seller at the end of the day. that’s complemented by the power of these new capabilities, and if you just try to go be a good human relations seller, but don’t wrap yourself with these new capabilities, you’re gonna be behind the game. So those that can bring both those together are gonna outpace the rest.
SethMarrs:
Yeah, use the tech, but don’t let the tech be the interface. You have to…
Christian:
I’m a robot behind it either, right? I’m seeing people do that. Well, it told me to do this, like, you gotta know the art and science of how to bring these things together. And make sure, I would say, like, one thing we did is we brought in a dedicated person in enablement to help identify, train, build tools, interoperability across the stack, get it scaled out, and as a mandate, right? So if you’re just trying to figure it out, like. Bit by bit, you won’t move as fast. Prioritize something that’s going to help you move faster on this stuff.

SethMarrs:
Awesome. Cool. So, Tyler, how about you? Finish us off.
Tyler John:
to add here? I don’t know. Well, first, everybody needs to generate pipeline, because, you know, people are getting more time back, you know, I essentially generate pipeline. But I would say, to maybe second what Christian said, this concept of collaborative reasoning, there’s a ton of tools and systems and ways in which people can go ahead and be more effective. sellers, but it’s your ability to use AI and the, you know, traditional blocking and tackling of sales to be effective that, is gonna separate the A players from the B players, and I can, you know, from first-hand experience, seeing it in other orgs and in my own org, people that come in with that mentality, that genuine curiosity of how can I become a better seller by using the tools that I have today will, outbound outperform those that don’t.
SethMarrs:
Awesome, awesome. Well, we’re up on time. Thank you guys so much. Learned a ton. I really appreciate… really appreciate you taking the time and getting the opportunity to talk to you all.
Julia Nimchinski:
What a phenomenal panel, thank you so much again.
Bill Dwoinen:
Thanks, everyone!
SethMarrs:
Bicycle.
Julia Nimchinski:
Seth, before you leave us, what’s the best way to support you? I know you’ll launch your own podcast.
SethMarrs:
Yep.
Julia Nimchinski:
Let’s do a shameless plug here.
SethMarrs:
Yeah, just, join that, LinkedIn, same type thing, but yeah, thank you.
Julia Nimchinski:
Awesome, thanks again.