Mavens of Modern Sales – Kevin McIntyre

Welcome to Mavens of Modern Sales, where we take a deep dive with the sales leaders pulling sales teams in the 21st century to get their insights on leadership, strategy, industry trends, and more.

This week we talked to Kevin McIntyre, Chief Revenue Officer at Dealfront.

A couple months back you said you feel more like an architect than a sales leader in your CRO role and that if CROs are only focused on selling they’re doing it wrong. What should CROs be focused on?

Yes, CROs are not VPs / SVPs of Sales. If you’re only focused on selling, then you’re only looking at a piece of the puzzle. 

A CRO is accountable for the entire revenue stream, which includes acquiring new revenue, sustaining it, and ideally growing it. From my perspective, it all comes down to the customer – the value they receive, and the journey you’re putting them on. The CRO must break down and understand the different roles necessary to facilitate this customer journey, starting with awareness and the buying process, and continuing through to the decision to work with your product or service, and delivering a positive customer experience. In subscription businesses, recurring value leads to recurring revenue, and this value must be delivered by the product and any customer-facing professionals supporting the customer experience. Beyond customer-facing roles, the CRO needs to understand what is required to best support these teams. This includes revenue operations, revenue enablement, and collaboration with product, marketing, and other supporting groups. The CRO must also be accountable for providing the management system to support the revenue team.  Technologies / systems, internal processes, meeting cadences and communication forums, decision making, project management, and so on.

In my opinion the CRO is ultimately like an architect, designing + building the teams, GTM motions, and management system to deliver revenue goals for the business. 

While selling is a critical component, it is not the core responsibility of a CRO.

Sales seems to be in a bit of a funk right now, no matter what metrics you read, it appears they are all down in all areas. What’s your take? Why are things a mess and what is it that the sales world doesn’t seem to understand? 

I won’t focus on macroeconomic trends because I think they can often just be an excuse or an easy fallback. So let’s look at three other factors that I feel are negatively impacting sales teams and professionals right now.

First, is that B2B SaaS is in a “phase shift”.  There is meaningful movement away from growth-at-all-costs to efficient and profitable growth.  There is no more cheap money / capital, valuation multiples are going down, headcount proliferation is cut, and tech-stack budgets are squeezed.  Responsible business management with good customers, good talent, and good infrastructure / processes will win out.  Efficiency and sustainability are paramount. Nowadays, we need to be much more mindful of key efficiency metrics, like LTV: CAC ratios, CAC payback, and improving output and capacity of each teammate. These metrics are way more prominent now than they were a few years ago. The costs of acquiring revenue weren’t as significant in decision-making before. And many leaders don’t know how to operate this way, or struggle to embrace it.

Second, I can’t answer this question without referencing the proliferation and impact of AI on sales teams and processes. It is our reality and it must be accepted – AI tools and processes are here to stay.  There are many offerings that can significantly improve how sales professionals use their most valuable resource – time – making them more efficient. This too ties back to efficiency and sustainability. However, I think too many people and teams either jump on trends without understanding their impact or are too quick to buy into new tools based on LinkedIn hype. Organizations need to identify inefficiencies in how teams work, find appropriate tools to address them, and carefully consider how these changes will actually improve their process.

Lastly, many businesses have scaled with a focus on selling to win rather than selling to retain. Too many corners are cut to focus on new revenue instead of delivering a positive experience to retain customers. People often don’t truly understand their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). When net retention across businesses declines, it puts more pressure on sales teams to counteract the lost revenue, which is no easy task.  And this can become a deadly spiral.  Net retention goes down → more pressure on sales to overcome the bleeding revenue → sales starts to win any type of business, including bad fit customers → customer base quality degrades → net retention goes down → etc etc etc.

With this in mind, what would you say to a first time CRO asking for advice on their first initiative?

I’m going to assume I’m offering advice to a first-time CRO joining an established company with an active revenue stream and not at a pure start-up just getting started (I don’t yet have that experience).

This might sound basic, but the first thing is to really know your customer. Well, not all your customers, but rather your best ones – the ones who use your product, get value from it, renew, and grow with you. By understanding these key customers, you can better assess the GTM strategies and processes that bring in more of them, deliver value to them, and ultimately ensure their success. And just to be explicit, this should be done in close collaboration with marketing and product teams. 

Once you have this understanding, you can start identifying changes needed across your existing teams and processes. You need to focus your time and effort on your best customer cohorts and make efficiency changes across the business.  In building demand, in strengthening sales execution, and delivering a positive customer experience.

As referenced, A CRO should not just be accountable for new business bookings and revenue, but for the entire revenue stream. If you can’t retain your revenue and use it as a foundation for scaling the business, the job becomes much harder. This is why you need to know your (best) customers.

In one of your 10 lessons learned in 2023 series you mentioned that you loath “lazy and sloppy outbound prospecting” can you share what you mean by lazy and sloppy and what does good look like to you? 

Instead of truly targeting accounts you believe you can help, it’s now just a numbers game.  How many LinkedIn posts are out there “Here’s my sales process for how I booked 22 meetings last week”?  Notice how no one is posting about their spray-and-pray tactics and how they are driving qualified pipeline and revenue.

I might be old fashioned but I feel outbound engagement should be about targeting accounts to which you feel you can bring value. It should be grounded in the notion that “I believe I can help you because I understand your business and I have a service/product that can address your problem(s).” There is more nuance of course, but that is the simplest way of putting it.

To me, this is what good looks like:

• Research accounts that fit the profile of successful customers or where value is best realized.
• Select personas who experience the problem or are likely in a buying role.
• Use signals to prioritize engagement.
• Research selected contacts to approach them personally.
• Engage prioritized accounts diligently through multiple channels to maximize connection opportunities.

And do all of this with rigor, perseverance, and an obsession to detail.  Many of these steps might be operationalized by the business (e.g. defining target accounts) vs. being on the individual SDR / AE.  

I accept – and embrace – that AI can help with all of these steps. 100%.

BUT –  with this new AI tooling, accessible and inexpensive B2B data, unprecedented domain purchasing, and email cadencing proliferation (all coupled with the fear of picking up the phone), we’ve gone ahead and ruined outbound sales.  We’re trying to use the easy button without doing the hard work.  And too many people and teams are blasting their ‘target market’ from multiple domains to thousands of contacts from thousands of accounts and go after whatever may respond, just trying to find the easiest way to get meetings. The abusive nature of data, AI, and these tools will have consequences at some point. Not sure when, but I’m sure it’s coming. 

Is there an example of a great email you’ve received recently that meets your definition of “good.”  

I knew exactly which one to go to, because I haven’t replied to many in a long time.  To this one, I did.

What makes it good?

• Email connects with me personally – referencing two LinkedIn posts I made (one about sales engagement tactics and another about moving back to Boston)
• Leveraged some form of a trigger event / signal to know we were hiring a Revenue / Sales Enablement leader
• Lightly presents why I should consider his product
• Short and sweet

Back to your 10 lessons learned in 2023 series, which lesson do think made the largest impact on your ability to lead revenue at Dealfront?

Without question, the lesson on “over-over communication”.  My Revenue team is over 100 people – and it’s the largest team I’ve personally led directly in my career.  Some people reading this might think it’s not so big.  But consider these factors: remote first, from 20+ countries, and the company is a result of a merger of two equal sized companies (with different cultures, products, and GTM motions).

Over communication helps build trust, secures alignment, and enables a healthy working environment.

For reference, my key takeaways from that post included:

• Ensure communication is simple and actionable – not all communication is good communication
• Engage your audience and teams to address their needs – don’t just communicate what you think needs to be heard
• Embrace multiple communication channels
• Empower your leadership team to be well-informed
• Repetition is important

You mentioned that you have 3 SaaS and Revenue leadership podcasts that you listen to regularly, what are they and do you have any favorite episodes you think revenue leaders should listen to right now?

Absolutely!

1. 1. The Revenue Formula – Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Mikkel Plaehn from Growblocks
   2. The Science of Scaling – Hosted by Mark Roberge (former HubSpot SVP of Worldwide Sales and Services, now at Stage 2 Capital)
   3. Operations with Sean Lane – Hosted by Sean Lane from Drift

I’m also excited to try ZoomInfo’s new podcast.  It just dropped with 12 episodes.  

And there there are too many good ones to pick from just to recommend an episode! I recommend to pick anything related to efficiency.