Manny Medina, Executive Chairman at Outreach, shares his strategies for driving revenue growth by focusing on ideal customers, maximizing growth within existing segments, and the importance of leadership agility.
This episode features an interview with Manny Medina, Executive Chairman of Outreach.
Manny shares his strategies for driving revenue growth by focusing on ideal customers, maximizing growth within existing segments, and the importance of leadership agility. This episode dives deep into Manny’s customer-centric philosophy, including finding empathy in identifying pain points, and transforming challenges into innovative revenue streams.
About Manny:
Manny co-founded Outreach in 2014 and built the company from a Seattle-based startup to a global sales technology leader with more than 6,000 customers. He pioneered the Sales Execution category and from day one, bet on artificial intelligence as the future of sales technology. Manny leads with a mindset of abundance, encouraging employees, customers, and partners to generate success from nothing but an idea. He sees possibilities in everything and inspires the confidence that it can be done. At Outreach, he fosters a high-performance culture, asking employees to show up as their authentic selves to rally the culture in service of the company's mission—empower every sales professional to operate at their maximum potential.
He holds an MBA from Harvard and a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania. Manny grew up in Ecuador and now lives with his wife and four children in Seattle. On weekends, you can find him watching soccer games and barbecuing with his family in his backyard.
About Outreach:
Outreach is the leading sales execution platform that helps market-facing teams efficiently create and predictably close more pipelines. From prospecting to deal management to forecasting, our platform leverages automation and artificial intelligence to help revenue leaders increase efficiency and effectiveness of all go-to-market activities and personnel across the revenue cycle.
Episode Timestamps:
*(05:15) - Driving Growth and Customer Focus
*(21:35) - Leveraging AI in Business
*(23:15) - AI's Role in Sales and Customer Engagement
*(30:30) - Future Trends and Leadership Advice
Guest Quote:
“The other one that nobody talks about is professional services. Most organizations have some kind of professional services, whether it's free or paid or partner, it comes from professional services. If you're partnering for the delivering services, then your partner will know a lot because that partner is a trusted advisor. So you stay close with them. The meta point that I'm trying to say is that, look, there is no direct line to these new revenue opportunities. You know, you have to go look for them and the way you institutionalize them is that you bring technology into the table.”
Links & Resources:
Our Sponsors:
About Accenture
Accenture is a leading global professional services company that helps the world’s leading businesses, governments and other organizations build their digital core, optimize their operations, accelerate revenue growth and enhance citizen services—creating tangible value at speed and scale. We are a talent and innovation led company with 738,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Technology is at the core of change today, and we are one of the world’s leaders in helping drive that change, with strong ecosystem relationships. We combine our strength in technology with unmatched industry experience, functional expertise and global delivery capability. We are uniquely able to deliver tangible outcomes because of our broad range of services, solutions and assets across Strategy & Consulting, Technology, Operations, Industry X and Accenture Song. These capabilities, together with our culture of shared success and commitment to creating 360° value, enable us to help our clients succeed and build trusted, lasting relationships. We measure our success by the 360° value we create for our clients, each other, our shareholders, partners and communities. Visit us at www.accenture.com.
About Conga
Conga crushes complexity in an increasingly complex world. With our Revenue Lifecycle Management solution, we transform each company’s unique complexities for order configuration, execution, fulfillment, and contract renewal processes with a unified data model that adapts to ever-changing business requirements and aligns the understanding and efforts of every team. Our approach is grounded in the Conga Way, a framework of entrepreneurial spirit and achieving together to champion our 11,000+ customers. We’re committed to our customers and to removing complexity in an increasingly complex world. Our solutions quickly adapt to changing business models so you can normalize your revenue management processes.
Conga has global operations across North America, Europe, and Asia. Learn more at conga.com or follow Conga on Twitter: @congahq.
Phil: [00:00:00] Welcome to Revenue Reinvention, the podcast where we get real about transforming business for predictable success. Earlier, we talked with Dominic Jani, President of Canon Financial Services. We discussed the importance of modernizing technology for operational efficiency and revenue growth. You'll hear Dominic highlight the need for an agile approach to innovation and his tips for instilling core values. Let's dive in. Hey everybody, welcome back to Revenue Reinvention and thanks for being here. I'm your host, Phil Dillard, founder of ThruLine Networks. I'm here with Manny Bedina, CEO of Outreach. Thanks so much for joining us today, Manny. How you doing?
Manny: I'm good. Thank you for having me, Phil.
Phil: Really great to have you here and looking forward to the conversation. So, I mean, let's get started with something easy. Can you tell us a little bit about Outreach and how you became the CEO? All right, let me tell
Manny: you a bit about Outreach and I'll tell you how I became a CEO. So Outreach [00:01:00] is, And now a full execution platform for revenue teams. And what that means is that a team has to take an action on a platform that generates revenue, whether you're building pipeline and you're, you're outbounding, or you're responding to an inbound and you're turning that into a deal. And then you're turning that into an expansion or retention. All that has to happen through activities, conversations, meetings, collateral being exchanged, you know, you're navigating the tree of the hierarchy and the tree of the organization, um, and whether you're selling, you know, for the first time or you're expanding.
And because that needs its own platform and its own set of workflows so you can measure and you can improve, that's why we built Outreach. And Outreach, of course, began as a sales engagement platform for pipeline generation and prospecting, and as a customer's Use that to drive deals and then drive eventually close one in forecasting. Our clients fooled us across the entire revenue execution line, and we're now the only revenue execution platform in the market [00:02:00] that is fully fledged. How I became the CEO is a different question because I co founded the company with three other people. Very wonderful and very smart individuals. And when we started, you know, each picked a job, right? Like one became front end developer, the other one became back end developer, and the other one became a designer, and there was no other job left than CEO. So I took that job and I filled it.
Phil: So you got, you got the, the, the pick of the litter, right? That's right. Or some might say, you got, you got the tough job. I was going to fill in it with, uh, something else because those are, the other jobs are pretty well, uh, pretty well defined and you have to, um, Be the chief bottle washer, pulling all the different things.
Manny: That's right. You put your headphones on and you're cooking, you know what I mean? You're in, you're in, you're in business. But with CEO, you get a 20 distractions and you got to make sure there's food on the table and then the rent is paid and the bank is full of money and people get hired.
Phil: Right. Well, fortunately today we're not going to ask you a ton of questions about all those other things. We can let you [00:03:00] focus on the thing that you're really great at, your best at as we understand it in terms of Revenue, but, um, before we talk a little bit more about you, I have a question, for outreach, what would you say is the target client size, you know, the sweet spot or the range of clients that you serve, and how, for the uninitiated, how is outreach different than a CRM platform that they might use? That's a great question. So,
Manny: If you think about a CRM, is, It's the drawers and the files in your room. It's where you store data so that you know where it is and other people can see it. So, having a cloud CRM environment allows you to have contacts and accounts and opportunity information that several people can collaborate on and take a look at. And you can also run reports. So the main, the main function of a CRM is to store all this data and then run reports for managers. And as you can see, at no point I said how does it help the rep, how does it help the customer journey, how does it make the rep better, how does it make the workflow of getting somebody from a company better.
[00:04:00] Awareness to discovery through a purchase and a transaction. There's nothing in the CRM that hosts the playbook and hosts the workflow to do that playbook. That's what revenue execution platforms do, such as Outreach. And now what makes us special is that, you know, we invested a lot in tech and, and what, and, and Outreach is, is very, uh, sophisticated in that it has It has a, it's, it's a little bit like chess that it's easy to master. It's easy to learn, but very hard to master because there's a lot of, uh, new ones in terms of how you run your team. So a lot of organizations now have multiple areas of drawing revenue. So you have direct sales, you have product growth. Then you have, maybe you have some free trials, maybe you have channels, maybe you have referrals, and all those are treated differently.
And if you are selling to more than say one persona, and in more than one geography, and more than one segment, and you have a multi product strategy and trying to grow products, you need an engine that allows you to [00:05:00] do all those things and measure it, because the workflows will be different. And that's what Outreach is very
Phil: That sounds amazing. You're obviously good at your job because I'm already thinking, man, we need that. So, under your leadership, Outreach has grown significantly, right? So, what would you attribute to the significant growth of the company? We are obsessed about listening to customers.
Manny: And So the beauty and the curse of having three co founders is that, you know, you end up disagreeing a lot with a lot of opinions. And because we realize early that we're going to have a lot of disagreements, we make customer the king or the queen of the decision. So if we had a disagreement, we all call a customer or a prospect and say, we're thinking about this way. These are the three ways we're thinking about it. What will you say? And then whatever feedback we got from that [00:06:00] won the argument. There is no reason for us to, you know, to argue anymore once a customer says one thing.
Phil: So then you really just have to define which customers you're trying to serve in which sequence, right? If you had a primary customer segment, then you're adding more customer segments. You might debate about who to serve or whose voice matters more, but it helps you kind of the separation of power is actually to really then focus on the customer. So it's built into your DNA as part of the organization.
Manny: That's a very insightful point, Phil, in that if it forces you to figure out what kind of customer you're going to serve. And I know we're going to get into this, but When you are thinking about growth, you have to pick a customer type. So, for instance, we decided early on that our superpower was, we consider ourselves the innovation arm for every sales rep and every sales manager out there. So our superpower is going to be bringing innovation, you know, to managers and to reps.
And [00:07:00] if somebody did not want that, they were not a good fit for us. You see what I mean? If you are not waking up in the morning and saying, how am I going to grow my revenue today? What percent am I not thinking about? What segment am I thinking about? What strategy am I not thinking about? I may not be your, your, your, your partner, but if you are, if that's front and center and you want to run experiments and you want to be able to do that, you know, that's why we're here for you. So that, that immediately forces segmentation. That goes beyond the normal segmentation of like size of company and revenue and all this other, you know, normal things into like, what kind of customer are you, are you best equipped to serve?
Phil: Well, that's amazing because we see that with customers across the country, internationally, every day with companies that are trying to solve that problem. Everyone's thinking about growth, but they're, they're thinking, who do I go to first? And in this environment where things are accelerating faster, especially because of. The growth of tools and AI and changes on platforms like Google or Amazon or Shopify. It's, it's just, it seems like it's carnage out there. But before we [00:08:00] get into that, I want to ask you a question about you and your co founders. So, how then, as the CEO, is your role of driving profitable growth different than that of your other co founders?
Manny: It's, it's no different, and we all have different tools to approach the problem. So when we say. You know, I remember distinctly when we went from 2 to 10. So our reach went from 0 to 2, 2 to 10. And we, 10 became our rallying cry, right? We wanted to get to 10 because in my mind, 10 million of, of revenue or run rate revenue was the difference between being a company that will die soon to a company that can live forever. So we made that our mantra, our motto. We even had t shirts that said T Mod. 10 million or die. And everybody had, you know, all 50 of us had T Mod shirts. Awesome. And. And what we did is, you know, we all sit down and we said, how are we going to contribute to this, to this goal, right? I'm going to sell some more. I'm going to try to expand on deals.
I'm going to try to bring in new reps. Um, we're going to try new [00:09:00] things in the application. So for instance. You know, back, back then outreach, um, we could deploy outreach with a minimum set of seats. So if you had a hundred person, you know, sales team, I could deploy five seats. Right. And we, that will make the transactions quickly, but to be able to grow the seats and need to be expanded to the remaining 95. So what we did is that we started, you know, we, we tried new things. Like we, we, we put a. Um, you know, invite a friend button in Outreach so that, you know, if you're killing it and you want to show it to somebody else, you can just invite a friend, they can come and look at your Outreach instance, immediately sign up, and I can just go back and, you know, collect. So we try things of that nature, right, of how do we drive expansion and growth. Um, so that we can get to the 10 faster.
Phil: Did that button work internally or externally or both? Like, I could have a buddy who's in sales in a different industry and I'm like, Ah, I'm killing it, take a look at this. And he's like, wait a minute, I could do that too. Is that the scenario?
Manny: Yeah, we did, we did it for both. So you can say, let me try it, you know, internally and then we will recognize that you're in the same company and just add you to the instance. Or you could be externally and I would [00:10:00] just invite you to come into our reach and check it out. So we, we try things like that. Look, some of the strategies didn't scale. Like I couldn't do that right now to an enterprise customer. But the other things that we did is that when we sign up a large customer, then we will do whatever they wanted, right? Like when you are, when you're going from 10, 2 to 10, like you, you're listening to customers very intently because you want the whole business.
And, you know, there is no substitute of working hard, right? Like you just, you know, you get the request and you try to impress it and say, you're gonna have that by tomorrow. And they're like, you can't have that by tomorrow. I'm like, watch me. And then you have it by tomorrow. And then, yeah, you did pull an all nighter to get that done, but there you are, right? Like, so you have to, like the hustle just have to be there for you to, to be able to put in the points on the board.
Phil: Well, hustle is great and it's essential, but how do you follow, stay out of the trap of building something that customizes and customizes. Too much to one customer because concentration of customer revenue or concentration of feature development for a certain customer or customer type could be problematic going from, you know, 5 to 10 or 10 to 50. How do you stay out of that [00:11:00] trap?
Manny: Yeah, no, that's a great question. So I I developed an instinct for identifying out of my customer base, who were the true students of the game. So out of, out of a hundred customers that I had, you know, back then, there were five. And those five CROs, they were living in the future. You know, I mean, they were just stuck right now with you in the present, but their mind already, you know, went, saw the future and, and, you know, they saw it. So that small group, sometimes they're not the biggest customer, sometimes they're not the loudest, but you, you know, when somebody just like, Whoa, that's a person that I need to stay very close to because their mind works different than yours. I would listen to them more closely than anybody else.
Phil: And do you have, I guess there's two questions here. One, do you have like mechanisms or specific approaches for engaging those folks that you're willing to share? And did any of the ad [00:12:00] hoc approaches build into something systematic that allows you to speak to more as the company grows?
Manny: Yeah, so I'll give you one. I don't have all of them, but I'll give you one. In revenue, you get to be a revenue leader by being a great rep. You're an incredible rep, you get promoted to manager. In the manager role, you are between a super rep and a coach. Eventually you age out of being a super rep and you become a coach, you become second line manager, you're a true coach. Then you become, you know, VP, segment VP or, or, or SVP and whatever at that point you're running the joint. The Most people will stay super reps throughout their career and then just teach other reps to be like them, right? Everybody wants to be like Mike, you teach how to be like Mike and boom, you know, you create a bunch of mini Mikes without creating systems.
The true super, super, you know, the ones with the superpowers, the students of the game are the ones that recognize that they are system builders and that they were just part of a system and they get to sort of [00:13:00] like grow out of that system. themselves and see that there's other ways to do the job and there are systems to be built. There is inspection systems, there is reward systems, there is, uh, there is systems for sprint, there are systems, you know, there, there are systems for, for running your cadence, you know, every week. And those systems builders are, speak very different language than the ones that are not. So I look for that.
Phil: Super. That's outstanding. And it's actually an excellent transition to the next session, because. The next section we talk about is, you know, about predictive pathways. How do you, um, identify different ways to predict new revenue streams? And there are systems and tools, and we'll dig into AI a little bit, but I feel like there is this tension, or maybe a perceived tension, about great people, right?
Great people who become great coaches, they hit that limit because it's a great place to be, or they're making great money, or they do not have the skills to go to another level, and then the system builders for which. [00:14:00] You want to develop tools or advanced tools or somehow leverage the AI to get into that. That seems really complicated. So let's double click on the different ways you can predict new revenue. Let me start with revenue lifecycle management. My understanding is it offers a full suite of features for automating and optimizing revenue at scale. So are there any particular tools you're using or you recommend to fulfill that business need?
Manny: So, of course, we use outreach because the game of revenue in a system that is changing is that you have to, if you have to break down the customer journey into components that you can measure and observe and optimize. And when I say optimize, it means that you need to be able to run tests and say, if I do this. Would the deal go faster? For instance, many times, you know, there's objection handling. But objection handling is usually done at the beginning of the funnel. There is objection handling in the middle of the funnel. There is objection handling at the end of the funnel. That is usually not [00:15:00] addressed. But it's not addressed because it's not observed, right?
And it's usually, oh, it's a negotiation problem. No, it's not a negotiation problem. It's a true objection and you have to get through it. So how do you get through it? How do you coach to it? And how do you observe it? So, the ability to see the full cycle, you need to first of all, break it down into pieces. Then observe it, you know, whether it's an email, or a call, or a meeting, you know, through the transcript. Um, or using AI for summarization or calling out, you know, you know, what's different. Um, and then, and then seeing if that's a pattern across your, your team and then, you know, coming up with solutions that address that.
So that's how you optimize your current path. The question I think you asked me is how do you find new paths to revenue, right? Like, how do you find areas to grow revenue? And look, in a world where we live right now, where cost of customer acquisition is so high, I The new path to revenue for most companies that I talk to is, how do I get more revenue from the same customers? Whether it's, you know, new [00:16:00] seats, new divisions, new products, new use cases. And that comes from listening, you know, you have to have an ear to the ground to say, Hey, I'm using your product in this different way, that's got to spark something. Or, you know, I know this other division that could use you that I was just talking to, you know, I was just talking to my buddy at the other division.
They have a similar problem, the one I have, boom, that should spark something. But you need those trackers throughout all the conversations to be able to identify revenue opportunities within the customer base. Otherwise, you know, you're relying on stories, otherwise it just gets lost in the noise.
Phil: Do you see that there is a difference between revenue that's generated from, you said there's a high cost of customer acquisition, and that there's that mining inside of an organization is where you want to grow. Do you see a difference? between the where the insights are coming from as part of the revenue team and by that I mean [00:17:00] sometimes most people would expect it to come from sales but I might expect it to come from success or I might expect success We expect it to come from a follow on conversation that's generated by a new feature or by insight from another client, from someone who's dealing with folks day to day.
Um, given how your organization is broken out to, to receive feedback from clients, where are some great sources that, that, that comes from, or maybe some unexpected sources that you could suggest for our listeners, how they might look at it for themselves?
Manny: Yeah. So sales is the obvious one. Um, but only. If that sales, you know, professional, this account manager, account executive has positioned themselves as a trusted advisor. And I know this is a loaded word that a lot of people use, but you know when you're a trusted advisor, when you can just talk shop with your customer about everything and anything. That's where that will come from because that person will come, you know, will, will share with you something [00:18:00] unexpectedly that, that will lead to a, that will lead to an expansion.
It can come from success, but success is exactly the same problem. There is tactical success in which I'm going to make you successful when you're using it right now. Or I'm a strategic success in which I see, I see the journey and your maturity. And instead of like just educating on what you are right now, I'm going to anticipate need and I'm going to anticipate the fact that you're about to run into this number of problems. So let me educate you about what you're about to see. And that sparks new conversations. So if your success manager or success, uh, professional is anticipating need, then you will have transaction being driven by success as well. The other one would nobody talks about is professional services. Most organizations have some kind of professional services, whether it's free or paid or partner.
It comes from professional services. If you have, if you're partnering for the, for delivering services, Then your partner will know a lot because that partner is a trusted advisor. So you, you stay close with them. They, they, the meta point that I'm trying to say is that, look, there is no [00:19:00] direct line to this new revenue. You know, opportunities, you know, you have to go look for them. And the way you institutionalize them is that, is that you, you, you bring technology into the table. You, you, you sort of like create a tradition in a, in a, in an expectation that you'll be using say a conversational intelligence tool so that you can, you know, mine the information from the conversations.
You create a, uh, you know, a tradition in, um, in, uh, in, in an expectation that, that there will be frequencies of touches. Right, and that the conversation will happen and the conversation will have this, this particular agenda across your, your, your go to market team and your, and your customer facing team. Because if that doesn't happen, then you will not hear it. If you don't ask the question, you're not going to get the answer. And the only way to do that scale is to by prescribing it and put it into an execution tool that, that enforces that, that commitment.
Phil: Now, doesn't that require either as an individual or as a team that you have the ability to go from awareness to [00:20:00] insight? To anticipation and you have to have like the training and the incentives to be able to act on the anticipation, right? Like if my, I'm representing this feed product and someone else is representing this product and I say, you know what, client's going to grow out of my product. I got to know that it's not bad for me to incentivize them to grow into the another product. Is that something that's. Fundamental to this. Am I understanding that right?
Manny: Yeah, no, I think you're understanding it right. And, um, I mean, you beg a much larger question, I guess. Yes, you should compensate that. You should encourage that. You should celebrate it. But, you know, it has to be human desire to truly do that for your customer. You know what I mean? I've seen the number one problem, by far, that I see with sales leaders is that they think compensation and incentives is the end all of behavior. And it's not true. No one is coin operated. We do things because we want to. Like, in our Maslow hierarchy of needs, [00:21:00] self realization is by far greater than just, you know, putting foot on the table.
We cannot put foot on the table. It's how do we actualize, right? Like, how do we become super of what we do? And if you are true to your profession, you will do it because you love what you do.
Phil: And you're a true professional. And that means then that you have to hire and promote people who fit the ethos that you're looking for. And that's way harder, that's way harder than a comp plan.
Manny: This is, this is why it drives me crazy that, you know, a lot of people talk about comp plan and, and, and bonuses and spits. And no, let's take a step back and how do we bring the right people and encourage them to do the things that fulfill them as professionals?
Phil: Well, that's a great point for actually trying to make a transition to the next step where we talk about artificial intelligence, right? Um, some people are using artificial, well, artificial intelligence solutions are popping up for all sorts of things, from finding talent, to analyzing the market, to everything under the sun. How is outreach thinking about using AI and where might you be plugging [00:22:00] it into the organization?
Manny: It's a great question because we've been doing it for a while. So the average, if you distill what execution platforms do, it's all about the language. It's communication based, right? We look at, we look at emails, you know, we, we create emails, we generate communication, we generate reminders of communication. Then we, we look at conversations and as the only platform that does real time enablement because we're able to understand the conversation real time and then pop little suggestions throughout the conversation to make sure that you're following the agenda, the prescribed agenda. We've been using AI for for a long time. What is changing now is the fact that AI can do so much more for you and relieve you from the, the, the, the, the work of, say, composing an email.
Phil: Mm-Hmm.
Manny: Or reminding you to follow up. And, and we're, we're all this AI is going, is that, is that, um, we're going from right now a human led AI assisted world, right? Where most of the decisions are made by you. [00:23:00] based on your gut intuition or what your boss tells you to do, or by the list that pops up in the morning, right? You get some lists, you follow up on the list based on whatever is hot. And it's going to go from that to a more strategically led AI world. Where the human will play its part in terms of like, we will have a conversation, I will dive deep into your need, I will, I will, I will establish an emotional connection with you, uh, but the AI will prioritize your day, the AI will summarize your email in such a way that, that, um, you know, the follow up actually produces a follow up meeting.
The AI will remind me that this conversation is not just about the next step, but I need you to introduce me to your boss, otherwise this deal doesn't have a true champion. You see what I mean? If the AI will make sure that all the flaws, all the cracks in the revenue journey are covered, And the AI is there to help you and guide you through it.
Phil: Sure, so to me, like, that second set of eyes is [00:24:00] like having that super coach you talked about sitting there with you all the time, right? The super coach is gonna say, you know what, I've heard this, um, this type of pushback all the time, consider this, consider that, the other. How long do you think it is before the AI does more than that and actually goes out and says, Oh, Phil just joined the meeting. Let me read Phil's LinkedIn background and figure out where he is in the organization to say, you know what, you need to really be careful because he's going to be unassuming, but he's a very powerful guy over in the organization. How, what could, what, how far is it from being able to do that? Or in other words, what is it can AI not do? when it comes to helping drive new revenue streams in this process.
Manny: I think at the end of the day, transactions are done emotionally and justify with facts. So, you know, we fall in love with, not products, but we fall in love with this full solution, including the person that is in front of you [00:25:00] pitching it to you, including the team that is coming to help you. Their demeanor, the words that they use, how do they, you know, greet each other in the room. That's really what wins deals and, you know, we keep talking about AI as if we are rational decision makers. We're not. You know, this is why we have the world that we are, right? Because we're very emotional creatures.
And the best person to read emotions at the speed at which human can read are other humans, right now. So, the AI can be this psychic on your side, guiding you through the strategic ramifications of do's and don'ts, right? Like, what if this person is not, is actually not a coach, but is actually against you? And it's leading you the wrong way. Like, how can you catch it? Because see, AIs are sense making machines, but they only do it from the history that they have, right? They're great at identifying patterns and they identify them without emotionally attached, right? Like that's our, our, our fault, right? That we put emotion into our past and then we self, you know, select the bits, bits that we like, the bits that we don't.
[00:26:00] AI doesn't do that, right? But at the end of the day, emotion is what's going to win the game in a transaction and you need to make sure that you're showing the right emotion at the right time with the right person.
Phil: Hmm. Outstanding. So, you know, how is it integrated now and what sort of things are on the near path for you guys in leveraging AI at the company?
Manny: So it's integrated now in our, in our conversational intelligence solution that we call KIA. KIA is short for Knowledge AI Assistant. And it's integrated now in our sequence products that allows you to create a strategy and an execution for building pipeline or, or building, um, expansion and retention motions, uh, from email composition to, you know, re order, you know, replies. And that kind of thing, the most, the part that I'm, um, I'm excited about is because it's, you know, we, we, we've been working on it lately is, it's how do you guide a rep through a process and then score him so that rep can self, self [00:27:00] improve. So, you know, the manager will decide this five scoring mechanisms that, you know, you should be looking out, you know, I sit down one on one and I say, you know, you got to get good at asking for next steps.
You got to get good at validating the agenda. You gotta get good at asking for an intro. You gotta get good to ask, you know, who else is involved in the project. You gotta get good at asking what was the last transaction you did and who was involved. You gotta get good at that, right? And repetition is the only way you get good at it. And repetition and feedback in the moment is how you self correct and get to mastery faster. And we built a module in our real time engagement to figure out, are you doing these things real time? And if you don't, we'll give you a little feedback and say, you didn't do it, next time please do it, and I'll remind you next time. You see what I mean? You need feedback in the moment, and then after the moment to be like, ah, I will never forget again. You know what I mean?
Phil: Yeah, it sounds, it sounds great, like, so that everybody can use each call to rapidly improve themselves. I know an AI company that is building training that sees how people Learn [00:28:00] so that it can optimize the training of the individual to their own pace of the type of, Oh, you like more visual than text? Great, let me give you more pictures than words, right? And let's optimize it so your training rate grows up. And that, to me, sounds like it helps the sales rep get better. But how do you get focused on the right type of deals? Said differently, how do you know you're spending time on the right deals to generate the highest quality revenue?
Manny: What everybody needs to do right now is we need to look at where are we good at, and where are we winning, and why? And it's not just winning the deal, it's winning the expansion, the retention, is the margin good on that account? Or that, or are they end up being a pain in the ass and drive a lot of tickets and a lot of costs to your, to your system. So what does a great customer look like? And then create clustering around different types, right? Because it's not gonna be obvious which ones are good and which ones are not. Mm-Hmm. Right. In tech, everybody buys one of each. But not everybody keeps one of each, and you can only build a big [00:29:00] business if you're retaining the customers that you have.
So AI is going to be really good at going out there and like creating clusters of non obvious set of customers, and then pre facto create them for you and say, these are the accounts, and this is how you engage with them in the past, so I suggest a similar password to these accounts. You know, it's really interesting because this is one of those old habits that are going to be hard to, to, to die, which is, You know, we love to do this, you know, year planning, right? At the beginning of the year, we create these plans that are 12 months long, right? That are the operating plan that we put in front of, you know, executive management and the board. And, and they usually rely on constructs that are familiar to us. Oh, we sold to this, in this vertical, this growth vertical.
We sold into this set of accounts that are x many people from 10 to 5, 000, and we're going to sell more into those. When in reality, that is, AI is so much smarter than that. You know, there's way more signals into an account that have That have very little relevance with a number of [00:30:00] people or you know, you know, what they sell for a living that are higher fidelity and indicate higher and better revenue than the regular cuts that we use on segmenting. So, a new, agile, dynamic segmentation approach is really what's going to change the game now. It
Phil: really sounds like an exciting opportunity to do more quickly. And I can't even imagine what that's going to mean for the benefit of companies who can improve how they're doing. And it seems like the pace of change is only going to increase. So, before we move on to the next section, I have one other question to dig into. What advice would you give other revenue leaders about driving predictable and profitable growth of their businesses, given everything that you know now in your journey, in your recent steps in your journey?
Manny: Every revenue leader right now is under pressure of growth and profitability. So you got to do more with less and you got to figure out how to do either. [00:31:00] And most revenue leaders I talked to are still going back to the old toolbox of, you know, put people, drive into higher production, improve productivity by 10, 20%. Um, playing with quotas, playing with, with, with compensation. And what I, what I urge everybody to, to do is to take a big step back and take a look at their business as it is built and apply two lenses to it. One is who are our best customers and why? And once you apply that lens, then apply the vector of like, where are these best customers going?
Who has the highest rate of growth? And why? And then, concentrate all your resources into those two areas. Now, I also urge you to not throw away the noise. You will find little clusters, you know, of customers that don't belong, don't look like anything else, that are just very strange, right? That I have, you know, three customers in healthcare, I don't sell them to healthcare, but just three customers are using me for [00:32:00] whatever reason. Pay attention to those. The anomalies here are more interesting than the patterns. Because the patterns are past, right? In the past, you know, in the past we had zero interest rates and money was free. So the past doesn't look like the future. The future looks like the future. So you look at things that are more recent, that kind of look like those but in reality could be pointers to where things are going. And pay attention to that.
Phil: I love when you said the future looks like the future, right? And the future is, is highly known, right? Highly unknown. So now you're, um, you're leaning into it, but it leaves hints. So look at those hints. Yes, there, there are signposts, right? So, right. Um, if we're thinking about, I'm just, what I started thinking about was You said driving new growth at new customers is hard, driving new growth in new segments is hard, you know, digging into where you are and getting the most out of existing customers, existing segments is the [00:33:00] thing. So maybe, let's just shift into this and think a little bit for an agile revenue leader.
How do you innovate and launch new models, new channels, find new customers and new customer segments? What sort of things are in your mind right now? Is it right now about that? Is it listening a bit to the noise? Is it listening more to people who are living in the future? Is it, uh, taking a step back and looking at some other macro trends? How do you, like, frame the thought process about that? Because at some point, the pace of growth, well, let's see, the risk of growing with new customers could be that something is, um, changing inside the industry that we're not looking at, and we might miss an opportunity.
Manny: I look at, you know, seasoned revenue leaders and I ask them, like, what's your, how, you know, you've been successful over several economic cycles. And what has made you successful? And, you know, they have shared with me a few things. So one of the [00:34:00] things that I took away is that it's always easier to sell into change, either change of management or change of industry or some kind of disruption, some kind of dislocation in the industry, because it will require a rapid, radical response from the part of the organization.
Then, and if you have a point of view into where that vector is going to go, you got to go in. So those are the easy ones in which, you know, if you have a customer and you know that they're, their market is changing, be all over that for sure. Because that, that is a, you know, an opportunity to transact like no others. Um, the other one is just follow the pain. You know, if you are, you know, the kind of partner that brings a solution to a pain found, whether it's yours even, or somebody, or something you sourced from somebody else, you're going to be a trusted advisor. So, if you are, you know, deeply with a customer, and then you know that you sold something that does X, and after X, [00:35:00] Y happens, and this Y is very painful, go sell the Y, even if you don't have it. Because, you know, I'm sure you can find it for somebody else, and if you find it for somebody else, then your company may want to build it anyway. But go sell it. Sell it first, build it later.
Phil: Sure, a lot of people are reluctant, nervous about selling something that they haven't built already, but it's a It's an important part of following the pain because once you have, once you have the value test that says, from the client says, no, I need this. This is something I need. Then you can go back and you can either build, buy, or partner to actually execute on that. I'm actually a little bit more curious about the change because what came to mind was, I was listening recently to a podcast that was talking about antitrust in Google, right? So if you think about all the different changes that might happen because of antitrust in Changes in advertising or changes in, because of antitrust legislation or something like that.
It's a potential change that can be very disruptive to people's way of generating revenue, [00:36:00] right? So is that a good example of a potential change that someone wants to stay on top of and be an expert in, in the, in advance of a client need? Are you thinking about, um, more fundamental, I don't know, fundamental changes like the growth of, um, the growth of, um, Um, AI and large language models and its impact on, on sales teams.
Manny: I mean, all change is good, uh, for business, but the change that I'm talking about is the one that makes it to the board and the CEO, and it becomes a priority right now because change is good. That hits that level of scrutiny that hits all the way to the CEO or the board. It's change that need to be, needs to be addressed right away. So you usually immediately have a project or a program with a budget. And you don't, you know, those are the two hardest thing to come across when you're selling into B2B. So when you have a budget and a, and a, and a clear pain and a clear initiative behind it, and a priority. That's something that you [00:37:00] can slot in if you have a good point of view into that thing.
So, usually, you know, a financial institution, they do well in the commercial side, but they don't do well in the consumer side, or vice versa, or they got over levered, or they got under levered, or they got passed by X, or P. Or, you know, or disrupted by Y. There is always something. Every industry has some kind of disruption. That is the constant that we have right now. But you have to be attuned, acknowledgeable of what is that disruption is, and have a point of view on how is it going to be. And you may not catch it. Like, you know, I, I was able to sell a really big deal on the back of a disruption. I tried to then replicate that with other institutions that looked like the one I sold to, and by the time I got to them, it was late, meaning the project had already started, they already had a solution, and I came in when the cement was already hardened.
You see what I mean? But that doesn't make it bad. That just means, that just means that you missed the wave, right? And like every other surfer, you just wait. You know what I mean? So the next one, there will be somebody else out there. So if you have a mindset of abundance, you will [00:38:00] keep looking. For other people that have the same pain and it will show up just you gotta you gotta stay consistent
Phil: That makes a whole lot of sense So, um, I have two questions before we go because we're running out of time, unfortunately But the first one is an extension to that question because I don't know if that mindset is a CRO mindset Or a CEO mindset. So how do you think the CEO will continue to drive change in business going forward in this environment?
Manny: I think it's inevitable. I, I don't, I don't. So it's not even the CEOs, uh, up to the CEO to decide because, you know, companies are own, unless you're an owner and CEO, which there is very few of those, you're, you're, you know, you're responsible to your shareholders. So change is what you need to respond to, uh, to fulfill the promises that you made to your shareholder. Look at Intel, it's going through vast amounts of pain right now because, you know, they missed some, some significant change. And I think that we're [00:39:00] all responsible as a leader to, you know, You know, see what change is going to come and get ahead of it or, or, or, or be quick to it.
Phil: And if we're behind, we got to come up with a plan of how to respond.
Manny: We say, that's exactly right. That's exactly right.
Phil: Let's fix it. Right.
Manny: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. So this is why, you know, I, I urge organizations to stay nimble and think less about your own product and think more about your customer's pain, because then you'll be able to fit whatever you have to their pain. Or something you don't even have, but you can source it for them through their paint.
Phil: So, um, in order to do that, you need to stay, um, a few steps ahead. I recently read a book that talked about how to stay five steps ahead of your, your customer. Before we go, any, any thoughts on how you would suggest people stay ahead of the customer's paint?
Phil: Do you have kids? I don't, but I have. I don't, but I have nieces, nephews. Do you have nephews? Yeah, exactly.
Manny: Great. And [00:40:00] if you spend a lot of time with them, you can anticipate when they're going to fall. And the reason you can is, A, you've seen it before, several times. And B, when you are in a caring mode, your empathy will drive you to be in their shoes and to care for them to the degree that you can anticipate things happening to them. So, anticipation begins with a mindset. You have to truly care and empathize with what they see. And when you read news and you see the things that are happening in the world, see it through their eyes. And it's really hard. I'm not saying this is easy.
By no means, I, I made us, sounds easy to say. It's really hard to actually live it. And it's, you know, consumes a lot of, a lot of brain power and calories. But do it, like pick a handful of customers, pick a handful of industries that you're really good at and do it. Anticipate.
Phil: That's really powerful, right? The mindset of really caring about your customers permeates your thinking and gets you in a space where you can go, you know, I'm not [00:41:00] sure, but I feel like this is a problem for you. And like with a child, sometimes I might want to let them stub their toe or hurt themselves in a little bit so that they know That, um, what I was saying was for their own good and they go, wait a minute, let's talk about this. That's pretty awesome. Okay. So before we go, sorry, I said that like three times in a row, but there's more that I want to ask you. So thanks so much for your time today. Where can people find you if they want to reach out and connect? And is there anything you'd like to plug before you go?
Manny: So you can find me on, on LinkedIn. It's probably easiest to just, you know, look me up on, you know, Manny. Uh, I'm always at manny at outreach. io. Um, but if you don't know me, just go to LinkedIn, look me up and send me a message. I respond to most of my LinkedIn messages. And, uh, if you are, if you are a revenue leader, I, I highly encourage you to think about your, [00:42:00] your, the transformation that your industry is going through. And to take a look at the technologies available out there, and if you do have a bunch of technologies, try to consolidate them because the change is real. You got to move fast and your reps are where it matters. And that's why we're here to help.
Phil: Uh, thank you for that. And thank you so much, Manny, for joining us today. And thank you listeners for tuning in to another episode of Revenue Reinvention. You can also watch these episodes on YouTube. Find us at Revenue Reinvention there. You can subscribe on your favorite platform and we'll see you next time. Thank you so much, Manny, for your time. Really appreciate it. Um, there's a lot of great stuff and I think people are going to get a lot from this interview.
Manny: Appreciate it. Thank you, Phil.
Outro: Revenue Reinvention is brought to you by Accenture in partnership with Conga. Discover how Accenture and Conga are reshaping the landscape of revenue reinvention. Their unique collaboration merges Accenture's deep transformation expertise with Conga's market leading technology solutions [00:43:00] to redefine effective revenue lifecycle management. Together, they're not just facilitating growth, they're engineering it. Join them in this journey towards sustainable and scalable growth.