Leading with Data: Transformative Approaches in Sales and Marketing

Chris: [00:00:00] Welcome to another data driven podcast. I'm Chris Detzel. And today we have a special guest, Eric Cross. Eric, how are you today?

Eric Cross: I'm great. How are you doing, Chris?

Chris: Doing well, man. So Eric, you are the chief revenue officer at Realteo. And today we're going to talk a little bit about.

Chris: Going deep into how you make data driven decisions. How about that?

Eric Cross: Absolutely. Love, love the topic.

Chris: I would think so being at Reltio. So just tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do at Reltio specifically, and then we can just dive into some questions.

Eric Cross: Yeah, sure thing. So I'm coming up just short of two years at Reltio as chief revenue officer.

Eric Cross: And, the way to think about that is I'm an op, operating executive that, has responsive responsibility, not just for cells and the sales motion, but all the other, functional areas and aspects that [00:01:00] what I say are like, outward facing of the organization.

Eric Cross: Customer success, professional services. Enablement training, complete sales function sales operations, revenue operations, and so forth. So effectively anything that's looking out the window pane inside of Reltio, those functions roll into into my purview. And I've been, in the tech, technology industry, software specifically, 20 plus years and then spent, 4 or 5 years.

Eric Cross: Early in my career, self employed in the medical technology space. I've been, for the most part, strictly enterprise focused regulated industries, global 2000, target markets some, SMB admin market, but primarily it's been the enterprise space working for enterprise vendors, over the last 20 years.

Chris: Great and wow, that's a lot by the way. And so I would assume that when you look at these different areas of your organization, like you have cells, you have [00:02:00] PS, you have, customer success, renewal, you own all of those branches of of the revenue pieces, right? And so I can imagine that there's a lot of data.

Chris: Different data sources that you would have to go through. And we can talk through some of that, but in your role as like a CRO, how do you leverage data, to identify like new market opportunities and things like that. Is there a specific go to places that you look at?

Eric Cross: I think it really, it's, it starts, before you even start thinking about data and how you leverage it.

Eric Cross: I think that the. The core tenant that you need to subscribe to is if you think about just the go to market function as an operating executive, it's not just cells and there are a number of touch points. And functions that actually impact your ability to sell. If you're a salesperson, typically, if you're in sales, you, you have blinders on, you live in this silo and to you, it's all about how do I.

Eric Cross: How do I generate a lead [00:03:00] turned into an opportunity and then close it? But in reality. There's a lot of other functions that actually contribute to that, whether that services, customer success, operations, pretty much any function within the organization. And so the 1st thing you have to do is make sure that if you look at the roles and functions that actually support all go to market efforts, everyone's on the same page in terms of.

Eric Cross: Yep, you got to understand or define what your strategy is, understand that strategy, set the expectations, have the accountability around it. But more importantly, you have to have an agreement across all of those functions in terms of what I call the single source of the truth around data. We're all going to align around.

Eric Cross: A certain set of data elements that are super important, and, we'll measure those will try to get signals out of those and then make decisions from that. But you have to get the agreement across whether it sells. Sales and marketing is a classic example in a lot of organizations. Marketing has their own [00:04:00] operations function.

Eric Cross: Sales has their own function, and they look at data and through different lenses. And that's not really a recipe for success. Especially when you try to define what are the KPIs that we're going to measure our success against. So I've always started with, aligning all the resources and functions so that there is agreement in terms of strategy.

Eric Cross: And then, when it comes to data, what are the core data elements that are most important versus those that what I say are just interesting. You can measure them, you can track them. They may not really give you much insight. And really have an impact on the business. And it's very easy to mire yourself into some of that versus.

Eric Cross: Level setting, the cross functional groups and defining, okay, a strategy around what are the data elements that matter? And then how do we measure it? And then what's the function in terms of how we represent that out. To the rest of the organization, you can call that your visualization layer or whatever it is you want, [00:05:00] because in reality, if you.

Eric Cross: You think about any software company, like for us, if I think about go to market, we have roughly 12 core systems. I'll call them systems of engagement. So you can think of this of things like Salesforce. Could be your outreach platform could be game site could be your learning platform. There's 12 of those that are the systems of engagement that each of the roles.

Eric Cross: And functions that they work in and do their day to day. Yeah and there's a lot of data elements in all of those systems. And so I think 1 core strategy you have to have, and we have an advantage here at Reltio because we're in the data management data unification space. And we actually drink our own champagne, but you want to have a central.

Eric Cross: Location that you have, very concise, clear, clean data that is pulled in from multiple sources. And so you can think of that as that might be contact data or company data. It might be data, related to if it's a customer, what are their entitlements and what is their usage?

Eric Cross: And the [00:06:00] list goes on and on. And I think, a core strategy for us is how do we take all of those data elements and aggregate them into a central location that gives us the ability to drive insights and action out of. And as I said, your relative we, we have an advantage because we're in that space and we actually leverage that technology to make decisions.

Eric Cross: I'll give you a classic example we made a big pivot as an organization about 9 months ago, just around our whole demand gen philosophy traditional software companies and more pivoting away from this. But it used to be. You take raw leads, you turn them into some type of actionable lead, then it becomes a, a marketing qualified lead.

Eric Cross: Then there's a handoff point to the sales teams, right? That they accept that lead as a qualified opportunity, and they try to take it through a sales motion to actually get it to closure. What we learned and this was, the 1st, 6 months of me joining was. We had a significant amount of fallout out of our pipeline [00:07:00] once it became into action state, and we weren't really sure the reasons why.

Eric Cross: We started really digging into details of what was really happening and we came to the conclusion that. We didn't have the right criteria set where that handoff point was between I'll call it pre pipeline and pipeline. And so we were just moving a lot of things into the pipeline. It was inflating what we thought was actionable.

Eric Cross: And then we were seeing 3040 percent fallout. In the early stages, qualification and discovery, which. The 1st, 2 stages of our sales process, and so I gave us a false sense of security when we would look at a 6 month view or an end quarter view, especially earlier in the quarter.

Eric Cross: We felt like we had the adequate coverage that the sales teams would be able to go execute on. But in reality, it was. It was a false positive because we weren't really looking at what was happening with the data from multiple systems before it even got into the sales team's hands. And so we made a big pivot just to out of that and transition to what many people, refer to [00:08:00] as a BX.

Eric Cross: And, without getting into the details of that, it was just really changing our whole process and methodology around what happens before something actually becomes qualified. And, as a result of that, 6 months down the road, our conversion rates have gone up the amount of pipeline that actually falls out either pushes out a quarter or it, it just, goes to a dead stay close loss.

Eric Cross: Has gone down dramatically, and, it gives us a lot of comfort when we look at, a 6 month view of the pipeline, knowing that we have clarity, knowing that it's accurate. And we know that it has a high probability that at some point it will close may not close for us, but it will close for somebody.

Eric Cross: And so that's just a great example of. We got teams aligned cross functionally in terms of, what data elements are important. Then we spent 2 months digging into that data looking for what are the signals and what was it telling us cross functionally coming [00:09:00] together again debating it because depending on which window you look out of on a daily basis.

Eric Cross: You may interpret the data to be something totally different than what it really is. And I think this goes back to what I said earlier, is that you've got to have that alignment across all those functional teams. And, there's a lot of a spirited debates that come out of it sometimes. To really, adopt the 1st principles approach, strip it down to its most basic elements, start with what, to be fact build up from there and then make some decisions from it.

Chris: This is fascinating, Eric, and I love this part and something that. I've heard from a lot of other data leaders was exactly what you said is sometimes it's not necessarily the technology piece at first that they have to get right. It's the alignment between other parts of the business.

Chris: Can you talk a little bit about, how you did that specifically with, the marketing, you and the marketing team work very closely and how you aligned on, hey, these are the metrics. These are the, what kind of conversations were you having? Were you working with the CMO and CEO? How did

Eric Cross: all that work?

Eric Cross: No, it's [00:10:00] a great question for us. This goes back actually almost a year from now. It was February of last year and. I brought together the leadership team and said, Hey, Houston, we have a problem, right? We're we're, we're evaporating a lot of pipeline and it's giving us a false sense of security.

Eric Cross: We're going to, we're going to bring everybody together. We did a go to market summit and I think it was in Dallas. It was either Dallas or Austin. I can't remember if you were there or not, but we brought. Not just marketing and sales together. We brought the operations function and we brought customer success, professional services, product management, engineering support.

Eric Cross: Got everybody in the room for a day and a half and there was established some pre work for everyone said here's the, what I'll call the problem statement. These are the, actions or the prep that you need to do in terms of things to think about. And it was as simple as.

Eric Cross: We just posed, 8 to 10 questions. That were somewhat philosophical. It's you don't need to put slides [00:11:00] together. Just think through these concepts here and come prepared to have a point of view on it. And, we spent the 1st day doing that, and then we came back the 2nd day. We broke the teams out into working groups.

Eric Cross: Came back, everybody, presented then we came back in the afternoon and then we settled on, 4 or 5 action steps. And what came out of that was, hey, we need to, we need to pivot our go to market kind of demand motion out of the traditional generate leads BDRs, get me meetings.

Eric Cross: I'll turn it into an opportunity. And said, no, we're going to pivot to an ABX motion. And once we reach that conclusion, then we, and this is a plug for Forrester, we actually went out work with Forrester group to basically stress test, our hypothesis and our thinking and the direction we wanted to go.

Eric Cross: And and they just really, they gave us a lot of insights and things to think about, but they, for the most part validated, we're on the right path. And then, we were off to the races. Yeah, that's

Chris: great. So [00:12:00] basically, you brought people together and you know They helped with that whole process of yeah, we do have a problem I mean you brought them together and said and then you're like, okay This is how this is to go forward and go to market strategy and we're going to do that I love how you brought that alignment

Eric Cross: together.

Eric Cross: Yeah, but that was the easy part The hard part is then you take this pivot you're about to make as an organization You have then you have to go To the lowest denominator in the organization, so all the individuals that are doing their roles and responsibilities on a daily basis. You have to convince them that this is the right direction to go.

Eric Cross: You can mandate anything right as a leadership team. That's not leadership. There are certain things where it's like. We'll take advice and counsel and opinions. But, we may make a decision. We're going this direction, for whatever reason, but give context of why and why it's important.

Eric Cross: The heavy lifting was. How did we get all the, the [00:13:00] sales organization, the BDR organization, the marketing function, the folks, especially, specifically that were really around the digital engagement part of the business, getting everybody in agreement as to why we need to go, go in this direction and definitely was not without risk.

Eric Cross: That was the heavy work and that's where you have to rely on your leadership team below. The senior operating team to actually go and do that work with their teams. In terms of here's the problem statement. These are the leading indicators that have led us to this conclusion.

Eric Cross: We're making the pivot or we're proposing this pivot and this is what we think the intended benefits are. But it's going to change a difference in the way that you work, but you're going to work more efficiently. And you're going to have greater clarity in terms of what you're doing and being able to tie that back to specific outcomes.

Eric Cross: That was a heavy lift and that took us. For five months to, I'd say, get 100 percent of the [00:14:00] team on board and look, I

Chris: think that just from a tactical standpoint, there are operating mechanisms in places like, meetings that bring, the cells and marketing organization together every couple of weeks to go over the data and how this is working, things we can do better, things like that, that, are just always now in place.

Chris: And that even some of those meetings you go to make sure that they stay That we're always working on working together and making decisions together,

Eric Cross: Absolutely, but I would say this that I think the hard part and this is a little bit human nature nobody wants to feel like the way they've been doing things is the wrong way to do things And right.

Eric Cross: If you don't create a bit of an open garden approach with the broader organization, it's if you think about all of go to market to where, an individual's voice will be heard, right? It's a penalty free zone. If you have an objection to this [00:15:00] state it, bring one or two alternatives of what or how you would do it differently.

Eric Cross: And one of the answers can't be. Let's just continue doing what we've always been doing, right? Because you've heard this, it's, you're either moving forwards or you're moving backwards. If you're standing still and you're not changing, you're moving backwards. And so you, I think you always had to subscribe to, continual improvement.

Eric Cross: I always say, do your best, better 10 percent improvement. Be curious, bring different alternatives, try new things, be willing to fail. If you're not failing, you're not, you're not working on the right thing, or you're not working on hard enough problems if you're not making mistakes.

Chris: When you look back at that that whole entire process changing to the ABX stuff, is there any lessons learned that you can look at and say, you know what, I wish I would have done this better, or we could be doing this, or anything like that? [00:16:00] Yeah,

Eric Cross: and this isn't a, this is not a criticism.

Eric Cross: I think that a key learning for me was. Once we got everyone into agreement, and we were off to the races, so to speak, we knew that it would take. 3 to 4 months of output in that new motion to start developing critical mass or a balance of data that we could conclude, hey, it's working or it's not working.

Eric Cross: I would say one, one of the we had alignment but we still, when you think about the operating front or the operational function in terms of, how we look at visibility into the business marketing, we all came together, but marketing still looked at things in a certain way. And on the sales side, they looked at, things in a certain way, and they kept some of the legacy view of the world in it.

Eric Cross: And so we, we had a short period of time where we were getting false [00:17:00] positive false negatives on data because we were still looking at it through 2 panes of glass versus the 1. yeah we've gotten 80 percent of the way there, but on both sides, we still had, small pockets. That we're still looking at it in the old way and that created, a little bit of consternation, a little bit of finger pointing in terms of whether it was working or it wasn't.

Eric Cross: Now, we nipped that in the bud and we're the much better for it. What I would say my key learning out of that is just from my point of view is.

Eric Cross: I was looking at the data I was looking at our process around the data and how we were leveraging it. I wasn't peeling the onion back as far as I should have. Because typically, as a CRO you're working on big rocks and. A lot of people say, oh, you need to lead as though you're working 1 level [00:18:00] down and I don't disagree with that.

Eric Cross: And that's not micromanagement. I think the learning for me was when you make a big pivot shift and what is, I would argue is the most important aspect of the business, which is how do you create demand? How do you enable people to reach you? And how do you go execute on it? That, that, that was either going to be a pass or fail scenario.

Eric Cross: It wasn't going to be, Oh, it worked. It didn't there was a tremendous amount of risk. And the learning for me was, when you have something that has the ability to have such a negative impact, if it goes wrong. Yeah. You probably need to be, peeling the onion back 2 and 3 layers and getting into a lot of the minute details that you wouldn't otherwise do.

Eric Cross: That's the learning for me is. There's certain times that you need to go as deep as you have to go to the lowest denominator. So that you can vet out things that are starting to run into a ditch and you're trying to keep them out of a grave and the [00:19:00] difference between a ditch and a grave is, a ditch is 2 feet deep and a grave is 6 feet deep and we didn't fortunately, we just said, a few bumps in the road, but I think that's the learning for me is I, I would have looking back I would have spent more time getting into a much more granular level of the detail. That's a very

Chris: interesting insight.

Chris: When you have such a big shift in thinking and, and, for us, that was an organizational shift, right? And especially for marketing itself. And yeah, that's a very good insight and certainly something I think others can take, from this.

Chris: So when you look at Kind of the future trends and maybe predictions. What are you hoping that, and let's just stay on the case of ABX and things like that, let's, what are you hoping that does in the future? And what's the future of that? What does that look like?

Eric Cross: I think for us

Eric Cross: if you look at our value prop in the market, [00:20:00] we have very distinct unique differentiators around specific market segments. And when we think about the the ABX motion in terms of. How do you leverage technology that gives you insights that people might be evaluating technologies. Right?

Eric Cross: So that's a type of, platforms. And then how do you prescribe a medication? So to speak. To actually go target where that interest is if you have. What I'll say very concise, clean data that you can trust what your market segments are, the totality of what you think you're what, your addressable market to be in this case, it would be companies that fit into specific market segments and specific industries.

Eric Cross: You start getting leading indicators long before something. Gets into the pipeline and your marketing engine [00:21:00] can, deliver assets and content to the BDR and sales organization to actually go out into the market to try to take that interest. And where there's interactions and engagement.

Eric Cross: Long before they said, hey, we're going to go and evaluate. Gives us the opportunity to set that table for that organization while they're still while they're still and I'll call it the education phase, so to speak. Yeah. So I think that's 1. I think the other is just this advent of artificial intelligence.

Eric Cross: I think a big change you're going to see is just around how your, your BDR organization does their day to day. Like you're going to see this big trend to where conversational AI or conversational email that's is generated and delivered without, with minimal manual interaction, that's going to be a big change, like at the top of the funnel, [00:22:00] the tooling and software that.

Eric Cross: Sales teams and inside sales teams and BDRs will have at their fingertips is going to radically change how many people you can reach and how you reach them. And, as we all know, creating options to execute on pipeline is paramount, but I think more importantly is the productivity level of the team and the individuals.

Eric Cross: Can you do more with, less manual intervention or manual action? And we're already seeing that. We're leveraging the outreach platform. We just implemented that in the last 3 months. That's giving us a lot of those capabilities. And we're leveraging, a set of data from multiple systems that we know that we can trust.

Eric Cross: So we're not investing, marketing dollars. On [00:23:00] demand campaigns that are targeted at 2000 companies. That in reality, or 500 companies that would even hit our target market and I think that's a, is a shift that we're starting to see take place. But we're, if I just look at the last 18 months.

Eric Cross: And if I think about, our data management strategy now, it's evolved and changed. We've reached a point where, for the most part, every function inside the company can go look at a, I'll call it a set of data from multiple systems, especially around your customers, right? Because you have all the, you have all the interaction data in terms of how they're leveraging the platform plus, the entitlements they have, plus the use cases that have yet to be deployed.

Eric Cross: And you can go get all that and a centralized, place that sits in relative. And then, when you want to drive insights you can dump it into your analytics platform, whether it's big query or [00:24:00] any of the other platforms, or you can throw it into a visualization layer, like looker so that a business person, a non techie person, regardless of your function.

Eric Cross: And go into a central location, and it might be a sample as simple as, pick 1 of the largest life sciences customers that we have. You could go in and I call it 1 click visibility. You could go in and depending on how you want to look at the data, right? You can go into the visualization later, or you can go into the analytics layer.

Eric Cross: And derive the insights that are most important to you as it relates to your job function if you're in customer success or services or your sales team, you have an aggregation of that data, but then you can present it to yourself in a way that allows you to actually develop some insights and then take action.

Eric Cross: And it's shared commonly across all the functions inside a relative where I'd say we're about 80 percent done with that. That's a heavy lift when you talk about. Integrating systems and [00:25:00] making certain that the data you have has been mastered. If you can get to that point you're in a, you're in a pretty good spot because we're already I'll give you the last thing.

Eric Cross: I'll just I'll give an example. We're about to start our new fiscal year, February 1. We already have a very clear view of next fiscal year in terms of. What our opportunity statement is in specific market segments, specific industries. Specific geographies. And so forth, and we're already leveraging that data that we have from multiple systems for other market or market segments.

Eric Cross: We want to go into. If there are specific countries that we're not in that, where we have data that's telling us there's interest. There we can, we're already making decisions about. There's a couple of specific countries we're not in today, but we're seeing. Or have been saying trends and interest in interactions.

Eric Cross: Not even in the pipeline. And so we're able to [00:26:00] have that at our fingertips. Now we're already planning for, going into two, I'll call it market segments, or you can say it different countries in the next six months. We couldn't have done that 18 months ago. Wow. That

Chris: that's, it's talking about Reltio like you said, we're 80 percent there and that, and it's really a lot of fun to see that data.

Chris: Mastered and being able to make decisions around some of that data. So I appreciate you bringing that up. Really 1 last question. I think is so advice for aspiring zeros. Is there anything that you would say? For those that are trying to become a CRO, that they should think about look at those things.

Eric Cross: And I'm asked that question a lot. I could answer that in so many ways. I think there's 2 or 3 things that I think the 1st question. That you have to ask yourself is why do you want to do that? Why, if you're a. First line sales leader, or you're an individual contributor, or you're a regional, regional leader.

Eric Cross: Why do you want [00:27:00] to take on more? Number 1 and ground yourself in that, because you need, my experience has been that the individuals that progress through a career that, let's just say in this case you come, from a sales background, the individuals over the course of 20 years that ultimately sit into these high responsible positions is they have a DNA of altruism so that they understand the importance of being a part of something much larger than yourself and they take interest in that.

Eric Cross: I think that's the most important not having the mindset of, hey, the goal is just to deliver as much revenue as possible, sell as much as possible. And if I do that, I will be promoted. That's not true. The most successful people in terms of putting points on the board are not always the ones that get promoted.

Eric Cross: You need to have a little bit of that altruistic nature in yourself, which means you, you actually have an interest in. And care about the other functions that actually [00:28:00] impact. The ability of the company to run, I think that's so that's the 1st, I think the other 2. Is and I've said this on, other interviews I've done is.

Eric Cross: I've been asked, okay, as a leader, as a CRO what is most important and what really determines success or failure? And there's a lot of things, but I would say the 2 most important things is your ability to influence people that don't report to you to do what's needed to go execute on the overall strategy of the company is so important.

Eric Cross: Relationships matter. That's 1. The 2nd is. The higher you move up through the organization, you have to understand that a lot of times information is filtered before it even gets to you. So you don't have all of the details all the time. And so it's super important to be able to make informed decisions.

Eric Cross: With limited information with [00:29:00] absolute conviction. I think those are the 2 most important things. Influencing others that don't report making informed form informed decisions. With limited information with absolute conviction,

Chris: that's really great. Did I miss anything that should I ask something that I just missed?
Chris: That you're no,

Eric Cross: I, I I would just, we talked earlier around, how we leverage data at rel to and. How do you get to a point where you can make a decision to do something differently? I think it's very important if you bring cross functional teams together, someone has to be in the room and it doesn't necessarily have to be the CRO.

Eric Cross: It could be another role or function or another leader that is the barometer. Around making certain that everybody's voice is heard. Because when you pull collections of people [00:30:00] together, I don't care if we're talking about a bunch of sales teams that are pulled together or a bunch of leaders that are pulled together.

Eric Cross: Not everyone has the same level of comfort. To speak up and you really need an individual that can be that barometer that is willing to pull people into the conversation that may just be sitting back and because they everybody has ideas. And I've always said, there are no bad ideas.

Eric Cross: The only bad idea is an idea that is never shared. And I think you have to work, very hard to create an environment. I don't like, you can say the word culture. I prefer the word, creating an environment within your ecosystem that, people have a comfort level to actually speak up.

Eric Cross: Give a perspective, give an opinion and then share, alternative ways to think about it. And the more people you can get to buy into that are willing to actually share and be a participant. Your chances of success are [00:31:00] much greater and if everyone feels as other voices are, especially leaders.

Eric Cross: Then when they're asked to go down and promote this within the organization, they buy in and they feel like they have ownership of it. And I think that's critically important.

Chris: That was great. Great advice. And Eric, thank you so much for coming on to another data driven podcast. My name is Chris Stetzel.

Chris: Don't forget to rate and review us. And Eric, thanks so much.

Eric Cross: Yeah. Thanks, Chris.