Todd Thomas, Founder and CEO of woodchuck.ai, shares insights on driving revenue growth and building a robust revenue operations framework as companies scale, emphasizing that the CEO's role is intrinsically linked to the revenue team.
This episode features an interview with Todd Thomas, Founder and CEO of woodchuck.ai.
With a wealth of experience in business development and sales, Todd offers insights on driving revenue growth and establishing a robust revenue operations framework as companies expand. Todd emphasizes the CEO's role being intrinsically linked to the revenue team, and offers advice to merge leadership with revenue strategies to facilitate seamless growth.
About Todd:
Todd Thomas is the Founder & CEO of woodchuck.ai, an AI Wood Waste Diversion & renewable energy platform; turning waste into energy. Todd has built his career harnessing emerging technologies to drive efficiencies and create new commercialization opportunities. Experience with startups to Fortune 100 companies across industries. Todd is a recognized voice in AI, ML, sustainability, biomass, entrepreneurship, connected products & services.
Todd has an Economics degree from Claremont McKenna College, has studied Strategy Execution at the Harvard Business School, and has an MBA and an MS in Data Science from the WP Carey School of Business, ASU.
About woodchuck.ai:
Woodchuck.AI™ is a groundbreaking AI-powered platform that is still in development. Designed to meticulously track every piece of wood from construction sites to power plants, Woodchuck.AI™ is set to redefine sustainability in construction and energy production. It not only calculates the miles for hauling wood but also measures the BTU produced and the number of homes powered with clean energy. Moreover, it generates customizable sustainability reports, providing General Contractors with invaluable insights for every job site. Stay tuned as we bring data-driven green solutions to the forefront.
Guest Quote:
“Anything that drives or impacts revenue falls under Revenue Operations. I think it's the CEO's job to drive that organization, and if you get large enough and you want to bring in a CRO to run your revenue operations and build out a team, you certainly want to grow to the scale that's necessary. But even when you do bring in that CRO, I still think the CEO is always part of that revenue organization. Your CEO should always be your biggest salesman, your big closer, the hammer that you bring in to close a deal.”
Episode Timestamps:
*(04:45) - Defining Revenue Operations
*(13:10) - Scaling with AI and Technology
*(14:05) - How Woodchuck Utilizes AI
*(24:10) - Domestic and International Growth
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Phil: [00:00:00] Hey, everybody. Welcome to Revenue Reinvention, the podcast where we get real about transforming business for predictable success. Today, we're excited to have Todd Thomas, the founder and CEO of Woodchuck.ai. Todd has a wealth of experience in business development and sales, and he's made a name for himself by using cutting edge technologies to create new business opportunities.
In this episode, Todd will share his unique perspective On driving revenue growth and building a strong revenue operations framework. As a company scales, he'll talk about the role of A CEO as an extension of the revenue team, blending leadership with revenue strategies for seamless growth. We'll also explore how he uses AI to streamline different revenue streams and boost efficiency across the board.
Let's dive in. Welcome to Revenue Reinvention, and thanks for being here. I'm your host, Phil Dillard, founder of Throughline Networks. We're here today with Todd Thomas, [00:01:00] founder and CEO of woodchuck. ai. How you doing, Todd? Doing great. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks for being here. It's a really, really good start to the day and really great to, to start chatting with you.
So let me just jump right into it. Now, I understand that you have extensive business development and sales experience before being CEO of Woodchuck and driving revenue in this role. Can you tell us about your first job where you were really responsible for driving revenue and how that background shaped your experience?
Absolutely.
Todd: I think pretty much every role I've ever had, there is an aspect of revenue, business development, sales, everything that a company does revolves around driving revenue. And then I also, do you remember that book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten? Sure, of course. Okay, that's a pretty popular book.
I was a little slower than most, so it took me a little bit longer. I would say when I was 9 and 10 years old, my brother and I had our first entrepreneurial adventure together and really learned [00:02:00] a ton about revenue and how everything impacts revenue. So I was 9, my older brother was 10, and we lived near a golf course.
And this golf course had a lake out in the middle with a big swampy area. So we snuck out onto the golf course and snuck into the swamp and found a ton of golf balls. We were pretty excited about that. So we stuffed our pockets full of golf balls and ran back to one of the tee boxes and when a group of golfers came by, we pulled out the golf balls and wiped them off on our shirts and tried to sell the golf balls and we sold a couple and we thought, Hey, this, this could actually, we could make some money doing this.
But we weren't selling that many, so then we had the idea, hey, let's, let's run these golf balls home and we'll clean them up. So we brought them home, threw them in the sink, cleaned them all up, got them all nice and white and shiny and brought them back to the golf course. And the next day, we sold every single ball we had.
We sold them all. They loved them. So we, of course, ran back out in the swamp and collected a whole bunch more balls. And we started making really good money. We'd sold as many balls as we could collect every day. Then we realized different golfers have different preferences. And so we would start to recognize the guy with the red shirt likes [00:03:00] Titleist.
So we would always have a couple of Titleists ready for him. So we were learning about merchandising. We were learning about product. And then we started to learn about scarcity. If we had a whole bunch of Titleists sitting out for him to choose from, he would negotiate a lower price with us. If we saw him coming and hit all the Titleists away, we And when he arrived, we'd pull out three title lists and say, Hey, we saved these three titles for you.
They're our last three titles. We would get top dollars for those. So that worked really well. So we're starting to learn about more aspects of business. Pretty soon, the pro shop realized we were out there and they actually came out to us and said, we were selling too many golf balls, we were cutting into the pro shop sales and they weren't very happy and they didn't want us on the golf course anymore.
They, so they kind of threw us off the golf course. So now we were starting to learn about security and legal. So, we moved our operation just off of the course to a tee box that was right up against the property line. So, we sat off the property where the golf course couldn't kick us off and we continued to sell golf balls.
We made enough [00:04:00] money that we were able to buy bikes for ourselves. Once we bought bikes, now this changed our logistics on our supply chain because now we could run out into the swamp, collect a bunch of golf balls. One of us would stay at the tee box and sell the nice clean golf balls we collected the day before.
The other one would ride home as fast as we could, clean golf balls, bring them back and sell them more. So we could now do two batches of golf balls in a single day. So we're learning about inventory, supply chain, logistics, marketing, merchandising. All of it was to drive revenue. Uh, so the point being, silly little story, but we made a ton of money that summer and we really touched on almost every aspect of, of revenue.
So it was, it was a great learning experience very early on.
Phil: Well, I don't think it's a silly, silly little story. I think it's a great story. I think, first off, I, I love, you know, kid businesses. I had one at the same age. But I don't think I was doing as well as you guys were. And an important thing, I didn't have as good of a partner as you did.
You had a partner that you seemed to really [00:05:00] work with, you trusted, you guys worked a bunch of different things out on how to do things together and you resolved your differences. I think you also talked a little bit about process and about operations, which are other critical components of, you know, revenue, generating revenue, right?
Or, or revenue operations. You have to have a system that gets you enough Titleists so that when the Titleist guy comes by you got him for him. And maybe the ability to figure out, you know, who else likes Titleists when you're comparing two or three balls next to each other, got to get enough balls to do that.
And maybe the better golfers weren't losing as many balls. So there's a little bit of research and market development that comes in there too. I mean, I think it's really, really interesting story. And it's also helpful to tell a little bit about how you start to think about that. So if we're talking about a more complex environment, the word, the term revenue operations sounds like a lot more complex than maybe than it really is.
So in the context of your role as [00:06:00] CEO, how do you think about, how do you define revenue operations?
Todd: Anything that drives or impacts revenue falls under revenue operations. The kind of the point of the golf ball story is everything impacts revenue. And so I really think it's the CEO's job to drive that organization.
And if you get large enough and you want to bring in a CRO to run your revenue operations and build out a team, certainly you want to grow to the scale that that's necessary. But even when you do bring in that CRO, I still think the CEO is always part of that revenue organization. Your CEO should always be your, your biggest salesman, your, your big closer, the hammer that you bring in to close a deal.
So the CEO is always a part of that. I'd say the first real kind of commercial revenue job I had was when I joined Zendrive. Zendrive was a really cool startup in San Francisco that had some fantastic technology that worked in mobile phones. It was a software product that could identify collisions really accurately.
And I was brought in as essentially the first BD guy to start building out sales. It was [00:07:00] a fantastic product. They had a ton of engineers, but they needed to start driving sales. So I was brought in as the business development guy and we started talking with Large OEMs and large telecommunication providers, anybody that had a mobile app that had anything to do with the, the in car experience, very quickly realized that, you know, I wanted more control over the marketing and the PR because that's really what softened the beaches and drove initial engagement for the business development work.
So I took over the marketing and PR. Then it also became really clear that this was a pretty technical product. And so our solutions engineers were a big part of our sales process. As soon as we got to that technical level, the solutions engineers were brought in. So the solutions engineers were folded into our, under the revenue operations.
And then of course, once you've closed that sale and you're rolling this out in production for your client, then your customer success team becomes critical. So really you're looking at, from the whole string, you've got marketing, PR, Then your sales and BD guys, then your solutions engineer guys, and then [00:08:00] your customer success team.
All of that really works hand in hand as part of the overall revenue operation.
Phil: You cover several really important parts of the organization's growth in that comment. The first being You grow from having a small team where they didn't need a professional in revenue, and then they brought someone in.
You started adding in different departments of the organizations, which in itself could be a challenge because people don't want to give up power, right? Then you dig into integrating those organizations and then making them all talk with each other. Those are three major things. How do you, how did you go from starting as the first business development person to aggregating all of this?
Control and ability to integrate these parts of the operations, because so often sales and marketing and success and operations sit in silos. How do you do something like that?
Todd: So when you're in a small company, when you're a startup, by its nature, you have [00:09:00] to wear a lot of hats. Everybody, it's all hands on deck all the time.
And most of your opportunities are really customer driven. Like we were really courting General Motors. We really wanted to, to do a deal with General Motors. And so in order to. Satisfy what they needed in order to really move the technical conversation forward, satisfy their due diligence and their engineering teams.
We had to bring the solutions engineering team. We had to bring in the customer success team. And really that meant built for us, that meant building a customer success team. We, we really didn't have one at the time. So we had to go out and actually find people and hire them and build out these teams. So that we could give GM the service that they needed in order to be comfortable doing business with a little startup like Zender.
We had this, we had this awesome software product, but the product in and of itself isn't enough. You have to have the personnel and the expertise to really support your client's use of that in order for them to, to roll that out and, and derive value from it themselves. And so it's really in a small startup, you [00:10:00] have less of that silo problem.
It's, it's all hands on deck. It's opportunistic. What do we need to satisfy this client right away? What can we build ourselves? Who do we need to hire to, to expand the team, to bring that expertise? So you've got some, some leeway and you've got the ability to move fast and, and pivot or optimize what you're doing.
Cause you're not burdened by, you know, a huge bureaucratic organization that, that can't move quickly and can't make decisions quickly. So that's the joy
Phil: of the startup. Yeah, that's supposed to be one of the benefits of the startup, right? You're unencumbered by that big, heavy organization. And it actually, this gives us an opportunity to shift into the next phase of the discussion about the predictive pathways.
Because what I'm hearing you say is, General Motors, you had to expand the capabilities of the organization in order to serve that client. And that creates an opportunity then for you to provide such services to other clients, to other big customers in other sectors and that sort of thing. So. It's got [00:11:00] a, it's got a, you have to expand the business to drive future revenue streams.
So can you talk a little bit about the transition from the focus of delivering to General Motors to other revenue streams? Because that's what we talked about in the predictive pathways, right? When you see an opportunity, I want to turn one opportunity into five or 10 and then strengthen that and refine that in terms of revenue and operations and sales and marketing.
Can you, can you talk about that for a little bit?
Todd: Yeah, certainly. I think there's a couple of main points there. One is for a startup, you've got limited resources, both in terms of money and in terms of people. So you have to optimize the use of those people. So you can't, you can't chase down science experiments where you're going to go build something for six months, hoping it turns into revenue.
We've got to define a clear path to commercialization and drive that forward immediately. And part of that, to your point of how do you then parlay that into the second and third and fourth success is, [00:12:00] we always said, does this help us productize? In other words, we're not going to build a custom solution for GM.
We are happy to do product development with GM and further extend our product as long as it's something that's productizable and we can resell it again. So by working with GM, extending the capabilities of our team, extending the capabilities of the product itself, that it now becomes a, a further productized item that we can ultimately go out and Really have a clearly defined mature product with a clearly defined sales process and sales book that you can now set up a sales team and go sell that thing a second time, a third time, a tenth time, a hundredth time.
I think that's when you really, that's that transition from business development into sales. When you have a really mature product that's no longer changing other than, you know, little incremental changes and you can have a clearly defined sales books, you can now say, Now we're going to build a sales team.
We're going to give the sales team this product. We're going to give the sales team the sales plan and let them go sell this thing a [00:13:00] thousand times.
Phil: That sounds awesome. It also sounds like. A very solid, traditional approach to going from business development to sales. How does that change when you throw AI into the equation?
Todd: So AI is fantastic at replacing any repetitive process. So depending on how you're going to market, you know, what your product is and what your target market is, you're going to be able to identify repetitive tasks. And so if you can then Build an AI process, build an algorithm that can replace those processes.
Anything that is repeatable, that allows you to do it at scale. Instead of having one person do the same thing over and over all day long, they can maybe do it a hundred times. If you can build an AI engine that can do it 24 7 at vastly faster speeds, now you're talking thousands or tens of thousands of interactions instead of a hundred interactions with a human being.
So AI is really, really great at replacing repetitive functions. [00:14:00]
Phil: And how does it tie into how you might be using it right now at your, at your company? So we've built
Todd: essentially an AI platform, Woodchuck AI. So we track every single piece of wood from the second we pick it up on site, through processing, through transportation, through delivery to the energy company, so we can then provide a really detailed report back to our construction or manufacturing client and tell them exactly the tonnage of wood that was diverted, The tonnage of CO2 that was diverted, the CO2 that was generated in transportation and processing, we calculate that as well.
So we can then tell them the net amount of CO2 that was avoided. We can tell them the BTUs of clean energy that was produced, and we can actually let them know which communities and businesses were supported with that new clean energy. And that's really, that's the chocolate. That's, that's what the, the construction companies and manufacturing companies just love.
They, they have not been able to get this data before, and they've struggled to even get their waste diverted before. Now all of a sudden, we're getting all of their waste diverted. We're giving those really detailed, wonderful [00:15:00] reports. And we're just, we're finding massive demand. So we're, we're growing pretty quickly.
We're pretty happy about it.
Phil: Well, that makes a lot of sense and shows the transparency of the quality of the supply chain in and through the processing. What comes to mind next is, well, how does the AI help you productize? It seems that in all of that process, there isn't, there are opportunities to figure out how to get more value out of your, out of your process or remove more work or add more value to the, to the customer, to the end customer.
Can you share a little bit about how AI helps you productize as you described before? So you're doing the right things in an efficient way for those customers down the line?
Todd: So we really have a number of different products within that same story, and we actually have three pretty distinct revenue streams that come off of those products.
So, thinking up front again about the construction and the manufacturing companies, we get revenue by diverting that waste for those companies. [00:16:00] So instead of hauling their waste to the landfill, we haul it to our facility where we process it. But we still collect revenue for hauling that waste for our partners.
So that's revenue stream number one. Then we process that wood, we generate biomass, and we then sell that biomass to our energy partners. So that's revenue stream number two. We've got waste hauling revenue. We've now got biomass wood sale revenues. And then finally, the third revenue stream is the most complicated than the most complex.
And that's our SAS subscription revenue. The great thing about that is we can sell that to our construction companies. We can sell that to our manufacturing companies. We can sell that to their end users because somebody hired the construction company to build this building. Most of the sustainability goals are really being driven by that end customer.
You know, say that's Amazon or IKEA or GM, whoever's building that facility, they have really high sustainability goals. So if the construction company can provide them those sustainability reports, it's huge value to that end customer. So we can sell those folks subscriptions to our platform. Then we [00:17:00] also can have partners, right?
So if we're using a subcontract to help us process the wood. We can sell them a license to our technology to help them process the wood, and we can sell tracking and reporting to all of their clients. It's kind of a whole other layer of clients. And then ultimately, at the end of the day, We can also license the AI processing itself.
We can sell subscriptions to the platform that'll give you sustainability tracking and reporting. We can sell that, we can license that to a whole bunch of different people. But then the actual process that we're perfecting in the processing of the wood and utilizing the image recognition throughout the processing, we can actually license that to other processors as well.
So we've really got three big buckets of revenue, but that SaaS revenue bucket is a big bucket with a whole bunch of different clients within there. So it's a, becomes a pretty, pretty fun, pretty high volume revenue cycle.
Phil: You know, that reminds me of another point that there are some of the components of this that are [00:18:00] very physical, very tactile, very traditional business, right?
Instead of sending it to a landfill and paying shipping and then tipping fees, they're just paying shipping fees so a customer saves money by actually delivering you that, that revenue. But then there's another opportunity for them to create value and to create revenue with the, the different layers of the SaaS model that you're talking about.
Can you share a little bit about how you develop the different strategies to identify new opportunities for value creation or, or, or revenue creation in terms of new products and services? Is it something that you're, you're intentional and you test along the way and more of a lean approach, or is it something that you're.
Always learning by dealing with customers because of something that's different. Is it driven by regulatory? Like what's, what's big in your, in your business right now for finding new ways to grow revenue?
Todd: Well, we, we definitely take a lean startup philosophy where we want to fail fast. We do lots of testing and we want to get the [00:19:00] product into the hands of real end users as fast as possible.
I worked with Walt Doyle, who was the founder of GasBuddy years ago, and he, I learned a lot from him. And one of the things that he told me is, it doesn't matter how awesome you think your product is, you've got to get it into your actual end users as fast as possible. They will tell you what they like and what they don't like.
And that will supersede anything that your engineers or your internal QA teams, it'll surpass anything that they can do. You will never get it right. But your customers will be happy to tell you what you have wrong and what you have right. So get it in your customers hands as soon as possible. So we have been doing that at Woodchuck since the very beginning.
And the other big part of it is experiment, test, fail fast, iterate, and learn. So really both of those things combined, the lean startup mentality and getting it into the hands of your customers as soon as possible, will help you mature that product really quickly and make sure that you're on the right path.
If you build it in a vacuum. And you wait six months to put it in the hands of your customer. What if you're wrong and [00:20:00] you are wrong? It's just a matter of how wrong are you? So don't do that. Get in your hands of your customer and get continual feedback. I'm a,
Phil: I'm a big fan of that. I am, I've had that conversation with Steve Blank and some of the other lean startup leaders on a number of times.
So I'm totally with you on that. But you know what, let's double click into that point because I think there's something else that's interesting there. How do you define what your product is today? And how has that changed over, you know, The first 6, 12, 18 months of the company's life.
Todd: Yeah, that's a good point.
So our, our very first hypothesis for the company was, you know, energy companies needed this biomass. And our hypothesis was that there was a, a massive latent supply of wood waste within the construction industry. So that, that was our theory. That's turned out to be tenfold true. I mean, it was a much bigger opportunity than we anticipated.
And kind of one of the ways we stumbled into that was, One of the first clients that we signed up in Detroit was a company called Bear Trusts. [00:21:00] So Bear Trusts builds trusses for construction. Trusses are 100 percent wood. They're a fantastic client because their wood waste is really clean, coming right out of the manufacturing facility.
But then the question is, is Bear Trusts a construction company? Because they're building trusses. Are they a manufacturing company? Because they're building trusses and selling to construction companies. The answer is, it doesn't really matter. They're, they're in the gray area. And we quickly realized that manufacturing was a whole nother area for us.
And we quickly realized that no matter what a company is manufacturing, it's coming in and out of that factory on pallets and pallets for the most part are single use items. Sometimes you can get a second use out of them, but a lot of times you can't, particularly if it's class, all of those come in custom pallets, custom crates.
So there's a massive amount of wood waste on the manufacturing side. So we had to do, I wouldn't call it a pivot. I'd call it more of an expansion of who our kind of core customer was to be not just construction companies, but also manufacturing companies. Then we were, we were growing and we were, we were subbing [00:22:00] out a lot of the work because we were trying to do this through a low capitalization model.
So we started working with waste management and they kind of heard what we were doing and they said, wow, this is fantastic. We have tons of clients that don't want their wood going to landfills. Can we bring you our wood and we'll pay you a tipping fee to take our wood. So now all of a sudden we've got waste management wanting to bring us their wood and their clients want sustainability reports.
So all of a sudden we realized this isn't just diverting wood for construction companies and sending them reports. There are these layers of additional ancillary players within this ecosystem. And everybody wants these sustainability reports. It's, it's just data that. Isn't currently available, but has a lot of value to large enterprises.
So whether that's us providing those sustainability reports directly to a construction company or us selling our software subscriptions to their end users or working with partners like waste management or other wood processing companies to, to license them our technology and [00:23:00] sell their end client sustainability reports that the ripples in the pond just keep going and keep going.
So each time we're, we're learning from this and responding to client needs. But kind of back to your original point of, you know, how do you productize, right? Everything we're doing for each one of these clients is an expansion of our original thesis. When Amazon says, Hey, we need these additional five data points.
Well, fantastic. We'll build that into a report. And then the next client will have access to all those additional data points. Nothing we're doing is custom. Everything goes into the platform itself and becomes part of our core product. So if we, you know, theoretically we could get some requests that are Outside of what we view to be our core product.
And then you've gotta make the choice, are you gonna do customized work or not? And I would say for most startups to choose to do customized work is very risky. 'cause then you lose your focus and you're spending your limited resources on custom work that can't be productized and can't be sold again and again.
So I would be, I would suggest if you're a startup, be hesitant to do that. You, you want to [00:24:00] take on any work that drives immediately to commercialization. But that work can also become part of your product. So you're not doing custom work, you're productizing and driving revenue at the same time.
Phil: How much of your business is domestic U.
S. versus how much are you thinking outside of the U. S.? The reason I ask this question, you brought up pallets. And we had this conversation with a couple different companies. They have somewhere doing waste of value in a number of different solutions. And pallets are everywhere. And construction is operated differently.
For example, If you're international, if you're in an emerging market country, some of those manufacturers just dig a hole in the ground, shove the wood waste in the ground and pave over it and, and ignore it may not fly here in the U. S., may not fly in Europe, but will in different places. How do you see the business evolving across the U.
S. in established markets versus internationally?
Todd: Yeah, great question. So, We initially launched in Michigan because Michigan is just, it's an ideal location. There, there is a ton of wood. There's a lot of construction and [00:25:00] manufacturing activity. And we have this fantastic partner Northstar Clean Energy that has three bioenergy facilities, and they were looking for biomass, desperately looking for more biomass.
So it was a, it was an ideal place to, to launch our business. And we've been growing really rapidly. We launched in October of 2023. We had first revenue in December of 2023 and every month we were growing month over month, so it's really exciting. But we also want to use Michigan in our first couple of processing facilities to really mature and perfect the process and the AI platform.
Once we really have that process perfected and we really have the AI mature, now we really have two different growth paths. We can continue to expand by standing up more operations. And, yes, the macro factors that make this attractive, the need for more biomass and the need to reduce waste, those macro factors exist everywhere.
Not just the United States, not just North America, those are worldwide issues. So our immediate focus is on building out our [00:26:00] network and building out our platform in Michigan. In 2025, we will start to expand across the Great Lakes for all the same reasons that Michigan is fantastic, Illinois, Indiana, even up into Canada.
All those factors really great area for us to continue to grow, but we can also expand by the license in our software. So if there are geographies or locations where we don't want to stand up operations, whether that's overseas or even, you know, domestic US locations, or maybe there's already a fantastic processor in the area and we can simply license them or technology, we can really grow through iDerivative.
Standing up our own operations, Or licensing our technology. So it really gives us a great flexibility there. We don't need to go find new partners every time we expand our new geography.
Phil: Well, I'm Todd. I'm a big fan. I know some of the numbers behind what you're looking at. Just in the pallets alone, and it's mind boggling how big those numbers are.
When you think about construction waste or other types of sources of wood waste, or the ability [00:27:00] just to divert what's going to landfill on behalf of a company as large as waste management, that's a tremendous positive impact, tremendous opportunity for renewable energy. And we've seen the growth in the demand of energy to support the AI, and we've seen the growth in the demand of energy to support the AI.
That's disrupting technology and the way we do live on the planet. So you're in an important place at an important time. Do you have any more advice for businesses or leaders that are looking to transform their revenue operations for whether it's from a traditional business or whether it's from a, a technology first business?
Cause you have both sides to that. What sort of tips would you have for them in going through the process that, that you've seen both in the past and now that you're building
Todd: here? I think it always comes back to the customer. Start with your customer. Who is the customer you're trying to serve? And what is the problem of theirs that you're trying to solve?
Don't build a product that you think is really cool and find somebody that will want to buy it. That never works. Know who your customer is. Get to know your customer really well. [00:28:00] Understand what their problems are. And figure out how you can build something that's going to solve their problem. And then as you ideally build a partnership with them, and you start to deliver to them a product that is solving their problems, You know, stay close with them, have them in your product development, get feedback from your clients as soon as often as you can to continue to develop that product.
So it's serving your, your end user to the highest degree that it can provides the most value that you can really build a sticky relationship and makes you invaluable in their processes. So always start with the customer, keep your focus on the customer.
Phil: So you started with a personal story and I'm going to ask to see if maybe you can end with a personal story because I've been there, right?
Where we said, you know, we want to talk to the customer. We try the survey or we try to reach them by text. Phone or whichever, if it's in a B2C environment, if it's a B2B environment, you have to, with it as a foundation, or you have to do something to create that ongoing conversation. So you can always be in that space.[00:29:00]
Do you have any tips or a personal story of like how to do that? Cause the what is pretty clear, but the how I actually think is more art than science and you seem to be really good at it. So it'd be really interesting to hear if you had a nice personal story about that.
Todd: Yeah, so I do think that's really important, and I think that's something that lots of companies get wrong.
Surveys are tough. People are not very honest in surveys. I mean, the obvious example everybody talks about is Made in the USA. Survey 10 Americans and 9 of them will tell you, absolutely, we'll pay more if it's Made in the USA. The data does not support that, right? People buy the cheapest thing out there.
It doesn't matter if it says Made in the USA or not. So people lie in surveys, so I would not rely on surveys. This is where you need to lean into your revenue ops, lean into your frontline people that are interacting with your clients. I think a nice way to do that is to When you're setting up your entire revenue operation, from your marketing to your sales in BD, to your customer success, [00:30:00] build a team that continues communication.
So, you know, your marketing guys are out there softening the beaches, your BD guys are building that initial relationship, they're making that sale, bring your customer success in before the sale is closed, let them help, so that they can be part of that partnership, so it's not a cold handoff, you're not throwing the project over the wall once the contract is signed.
They've already met the customer success. They're part of it. Let the customer success team continue to serve this client and stay close to them and get feedback. But there may be times when a situation comes up, you may want to pull the BD person back into the conversation because they have a relationship or they have an understanding of an aspect of the client's business that the conscious success team does not.
So use that team aspect to really build that strong relationship with the client, stay close to them, stay in contact with them, and get real live feedback. People you have a relationship with. You're going to get much more honest feedback when you sit down at a table with someone. It doesn't matter if it's over a zoom call or physically at a table, [00:31:00] but you're going to get much better feedback from someone that you have a personal relationship with than just a cold survey.
So lean on your operations team, lean on whoever is closest to your customers and has the most direct relationship with your customer. That's going to give you the best feedback on your product. I think that's really practical
Phil: advice. Thank you for sharing. It could be really, really helpful. I think it can also help you build the culture that you were talking about earlier, such that everybody is engaged and everyone knows that they have a role with the customer and that their input matters.
And the more you take. The information from all those folks to draw people back. The salesperson person doesn't feel like I'm being drawn back because success can't do their job. The salesperson knows that the relationship matters for the entire entity to deliver on the promise that you've offered, which I think is, is great.
And I think it's a really helpful story. So thanks for, for sharing it. Lastly, One last question, how do you think the CEO or CRO role and revenue model will continue to change [00:32:00] business in the future?
Todd: So as we talked about earlier, I think the CEO, no matter how big your organization is, is always an extension of that revenue team.
So whether you have a, just a CEO, that's running revenue, or you have a CRO in place, that's running all the revenue teams and all the rev ops, the CEO is still a part of that, you need to have a really good partnership there. And then just like we just talked about. The decisions can't be made, you know, at a, at a, at a plush weekend resort between the CEO and the CRO, you know, talking about the product and coming up with ideas.
You're going to make much better decisions. You're gonna make better product decisions, better marketing decisions. If you involve a really diverse group of people from your company, as you're making those decisions, and if you, and particularly the people that are closest to your customer and ideally include your customers.
So if you think it's time to reiterate on your product, or you're thinking about bringing in a new product, have a workshop and bring in execs, bring in the accounting team, bring in your sales guys, bring in your [00:33:00] customer success team. Bring in a couple of clients that have familiarity with your products and do the whiteboarding and the brainstorming with them.
And, you know, those workshops, if you find a really good facilitator that really knows how to draw out ideas and iterate on that, you know, these, these innovation workshops can be really productive and drive real product improvements and drive real additional value for your end users. So I really like facilitated innovation workshops.
That are really using an audience of people from all throughout your organization and particularly with your clients as well.
Phil: Well, thanks, Todd. Thank you so much for joining us today. And thank you listeners for tuning in for another episode of Revenue Reinvention. You can also watch these episodes on YouTube, find us at Revenue Reinvention, and subscribe on your favorite platform.
We'll see you next time. Thanks so much, Todd, for joining us. Really appreciate you. Thanks so much, Phil. Great conversation.
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