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Alex King, Lead Value Consultant at Webflow · Pre-Sales Pathways

• Chris: Hello and welcome to Presales Pathways, the podcast that showcases highly successful pre sales professionals and the different career paths that they've taken. I'm your host, Chris Clark, and on today's episode, I'm joined by Alex King, lead value consultant at Webflow. One of the earliest pieces of advice you'll get as a solutions engineer is to focus on value, not on features. The value consulting role takes that to a whole nother level. These individuals think day in, day out about how to communicate and quantify the value of solutions, particularly to executives. If you've been interested not just in the technology, but the outcomes it's there to deliver, this episode is for you. Hey Alex, good to see you. Thanks for coming on the show. Alex: Course, wouldn't have it any other way. I'm super excited to be here. Chris: Likewise. So so Alex, take us right to the beginning of your career. How was it that you found your way into pre sales in the first place? Alex: Sure. So my career ranged before I found pre-sales. I started in the music industry actually. this was at the time that software was eating the music industry. So ended up leaving there, moving into pharmaceuticals, spent some time in phar pharmaceuticals, but at the same time a lot of what I was doing was digital marketing and leaning into sort of the technologic or the technology space. that is when The sort of pre-sales world came into or came onto my radar. a good friend of mine who I went to college with was at Oracle at the time. He was a solutions consultant at Oracle, and knew that I was looking for something a little bit different and mentioned to me this SC role could be interesting to me. I didn't know what an SC was, I had never heard of the job before. but I explored that role. I ended up interviewing with Oracle, had a really powerful couple moments where. The person who would end up being my manager and I just through the interview process got on a whiteboard, started talking business strategy, and I think that was the moment that I was like, okay, this job is something that could be really interesting and something that I might enjoy doing. ended up getting that opportunity, and I have been in pre-sale since. So it's been about 11 years now that I've been spending my time selling software to companies. Chris: And pick it up from Oracle. What did the S C or the S C role look like there? Alex: Yeah, so the SE role at Oracle was a very business focused role. It'll sort of blend into the rest of my career so far in pre-sale. But we think a lot about sort of like the technical and business skill set and the application of technology to business problems as SEs and pre-sales professionals. Excuse me. Chris: Hm. Alex: The Oracle role was definitely more business. It's how do you demo to a problem? How do you connect the business problem to the solution? I lovingly refer to one of the things that we used to do at Oracle as the firing squad, where I would get up in front of my VP, my directors, my manager, and present a deal and show them the demo that I had, and they would kind of tear it apart and say, like, okay, this isn't connected to the business problem clearly enough here, shift the sort of narrative over the this way. So very business, I say all that and go down that tangent to say very business centric role at Oracle. Chris: Yeah. Yeah. This firing squad it sounds like what like a deal review on steroids. Alex: Yeah, you could call it that. The motto in our group was Iron Sharpens Iron. So it was definitely a deal review on steroids. but it really as as painful as it was sometimes, it actually really helped me, right? Because it really helped me develop the business acumen that I would need to ultimately move into value consulting, to ultimately help the organizations that I've worked with think about how their solution and the technology that they're building connects to the business problem that they're solving for a customer. Chris: Okay. Yeah. So so you have this very business value oriented start in solutions engineering in Oracle. What comes next? Alex: so I found my way to Slack next. this is about summer of twenty seventeen. and when I got to Slack, it was a bit of a different world, right? So Slack was much earlier on as an organization. We're still kind of finding our footing, but we have this incredible virality as a product. and we're starting to sort of make the enterprise turn. So when I got to Slack, the solutions engineering role was incredibly technical. I met folks like the likes of David Smock, very sort of strategic and technical SE, Lauren Oliphant, you, Chris, just a couple names that come to mind who were very adept at the technical capability and selling sort of value within the technical realm to IT stakeholders. I tried to be that. That wasn't that. that was really sort of one of the things that when we get to career advice I'll talk about is just kind of finding your niche. but What I brought to the table after a couple failed starts with kind of the technical expertise was the business value expertise that I learned at Oracle. Right. So how do I actually look at Slack and not just sort of apply it to communication, but apply it to workflow and apply it to an outcome that shows up on a PL. and that's really where I started turning the corner and finding success at Slack was having that conversation. And then that led into the first business case that I wrote, which I'm happy to get into if Yeah. Chris: Yeah, and I think that's probably a recurring theme at different companies, right? You mentioned that Slack was at a very different stage, the virality of the the software, a lot of these product led growth motions in the early days, it's like early adopters buy it and love it and they might do it on the features and functions, but there comes a point where you need to shift that conversation much, much, much more towards value. Alex: Hundred percent. A hundred percent. And that's where I ended up finding the momentum, I think, within my career. That's where the rocket ship started, if you will. there was an opportunity that I was working at the time as a solutions engineer where I just saw it fit to write a business case in that opportunity. we were selling to a CTO and a bunch of technical stakeholders, but somebody at the end of the line was looking at the P and L and saying, Okay, how do we actually justify this expenditure? in our Organization. So I wrote a business case that ended up closing a pretty healthy six-figure opportunity. And that's when the eyes turned and I kind of had a had to do that moment. I then started getting asked into a bunch of deals. Can you help us look at this strategically? Can you help us write a business case? Can you help us write a narrative opportunity? and that I think, you know, the the cliche is luck is when preparation meets timing. that was kind of preparation meeting timing in that the head of sales at the time and then a solutions engineering leader came to me and said, Do you want to actually do this full time? Do you want to start a value consulting function here? which leads me into value consulting. Chris: Nice. Yeah, and so often with these roles it starts as a sort of side gig, right? Or something that you're you're good at in your normal role before becoming a a full blown role. So pick up then where Slack left off, like what came after Slack? Alex: Yeah. let me let me dig into value consulting a little bit at Slack and then I'll kind of bend through the journey of my career since then. so I started in value consulting, we didn't know what we were doing, we were sort of building this function from the ground up. took us a couple quarters to kind of figure it out, but when we did, we really took off. Chris: Mm-hmm. Alex: Slack for a lot of people is a chat platform, but what they didn't realize was the integration capability and the sort of information layer that allowed things to move faster and in context. So a lot of what we were doing was structuring our business cases around workflow. So think Slack for sales or Slack for customer support, Slack for engineering, which then helped us to sort of tie into one of the goals or initiatives that our customers would have. so I spent about Chris: Mm. Mm. Alex: Four and a half years doing that, going from individual contributor to leading the team. and then decided That I had the opportunity and time in life at that point to take a little bit of a career break. So I spent a year pursuing a couple different things, entrepreneurial goals, photography. Outside of work, I love photography and I'm a photographer. and then living abroad. So I lived in Colombia and Mexico, working on my Spanish. And Chris: Nice. Alex: I thought it was a really sort of informative experience because it did two things for me. One is it sort of gave me perspective for the world and a lot of the things that you would expect by sort of taking yourself out of the day-to-day of the hustle and bustle of working in this industry. And the other is I think it actually made me a better professional and better value consultant. as I was sort of going through the entrepreneurial sort of goals that I had, I was evaluating opportunities and taking a really sharp look at the finance, the different kinds of companies and starting to figure out what works, what doesn't work, how do you sort of tell the story financially of organizations, which then became immediately applicable to the work I do today. similarly, there was a lot of sort of strategy as I was sort of evaluating these opportunities that I needed to think about, right? Total addressable markets and who the customer base is, who the customer base would be. So all of that is work Chris: Mm-hmm. Got it. Alex: That I took into value consulting today. I decided ultimately to come back into the industry just because I think there were some opportunities that I wanted to take advantage of. spent a bit of time at a climate tech company helping them to stand up their sort of value motion. And then you know, networks are probably the most important thing you maintain in business. and got a call from one of our former colleagues, Pete She, and came and started the value consulting program here at Webflow. Chris: Amazing. So yeah, talk us through that. What does the role look like at a high level? What's some of the things, you know, a lot of the listeners of the the podcast maybe are working at organizations that don't necessarily have a a value consulting team or maybe they haven't had that much exposure to it. So like help us understand your role and the function at a high level. Alex: Yeah. Sure. So I'll talk about sort of what value consulting looks like in the industry, and then I'll give a little perspective on my on on how I think about the role today. So the essential function of value consulting is to tell the story, the why story of why a business is going to invest in a piece of software. It starts with sort of the strategic narrative, and then the thing that most people recognize most immediately from value consultants is the financial model that justifies the spend. So what's the return on investment essentially? Chris: Mm. Alex: There are different flavors of it. It looks different at different companies, but those are kind of the core functions, I would say, of a value consultant. The other thing that I'm starting to really kind of dig into is value realization and how do we start telling the story of customers who have purchased, what they're receiving, and the outcomes that they're achieving. So that is something that I think is more and more coming into the value consulting world, especially as AI allows us to scale really effectively. Chris: Mm-hmm. And so just just broadly speaking, for the audience that might not have heard those terms before, value consulting or value engineering is maybe pre-sales and value realization is post sales. Alex: Yeah. Yes, hundred percent. Thanks for that clarification. my perspective on the role is that I think it's shifting a bit. I think there's a couple things that are gonna be consistent and a few things that are definitely changing is Especially with AI leaning in. So I look at value consulting as kind of four core skills. There's a consultant, right? So it's hearing, it's understanding, it's taking in vast amounts of information, it's sort of distilling it into action. There's deal strategists. So and and consultant, I think about externally. Deal strategist is really about the internal sort of role and supporting your sales team. So what are the things that you're seeing? How can we sort of recognize patterns and apply them across deals, right? We as value consultants see way more deals than the Individual seller and even our SE counterparts sometimes. So, how do we start to sort of recognize patterns and then apply things that help us scale and win more deals? Of course, there is a financial modeling component with financial expertise is helpful. So, really kind of understanding how a finance person thinks or CFO thinks can be helpful. And I should say I don't want this to alienate anybody who is considering this as an opportunity, right? I started as a solutions engineer, I learned all of that stuff on the job. It took some Training, it took some sort of individual initiative, but I do not have a finance or MBA background. and then a lot of it is also enablement, right? So thinking about, and this is where we start to segue into a little bit of a different world, we're coming in with a mindset that a lot of our sort of individual cons or individual contributor peers may not necessarily have, right? We're thinking about the big picture. How does this show up? How does this opportunity show up at the board level when they are in the room discussing what to invest in over the course of the year? how do we make sure we're above the full versus below the fold? A lot of what we're doing as value consultants is helping to enable the sales team to start think like that a little bit, right? And and we're gonna come in very concentrated. It's gonna sort of diffuse across the organization, but I always say one more insight, one more deal, and we've done our job. Chris: Mm-hmm. I guess pulling that thread a bit more, a lot of SEs will think in terms of ratios and they might be used to, you know, maybe one SE for every three sales reps or one SE for every four, or maybe like up to six in mid-market. But the ratios for value consulting are quite different, right? And so that's part of the reason why there's this emphasis on you can't be involved in every deal, but you have to enable the field. Alex: Yeah, a hundred percent. So when I think about ratios for value consulting, it depends on again size of organization, but it's usually somewhere between one to eighty to one to a hundred salespeople. so vastly different than your one to six SE ratio. But again, the way that we think about it is there's probably it's the eighty-twenty rule, right? Twenty percent of your deals are gonna be the strategic deals, they're gonna be a strategic logo for the company or a high value deal where we're investing direct time, whereas the eighty percent is all scaling. Chris: Well. Alex: And I think that's where a lot of AI capabilities are giving us leverage, right? We can build the tools that we need to, whether it's narrative tools, whether it's business value assessment calculating tools, all of those sorts of things very rapidly and then scale those out. So much so that I feel like my job is shifting and shifted really over the course of the last six months from value consultants more into product manager and like building products and managing those products. Chris: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Interesting. So before we get deeper into the the scale side of things, when I think about those deals you mentioned the sort of top deals where you would be directly involved, I think there's maybe a misconception right out there that a lot of people, like you said, the the most recognizable deliverable or output for the value team would be a business case, right? But but there's more to it than that, right? Like what what would a Alex: Right. Chris: Typical engagement look like where it's one of those more high-touch engagements and you are working directly with the account team and the customer. What what are some of the things you'll be involved in? Alex: Absolutely. So I'll give you an example from an opportunity that we're working on right now. early stage opportunity, we got engaged at the executive level. The executive, as they do, sometimes pushes you down to the person that's actually going to run the evaluation. There is a large enterprise, right? A lot of different stakeholders, a lot of people who are gonna have say in this opportunity. so part of what my role is is structuring the actual interview plan. So, how do we actually go interview? Chris: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Alex: The 14 to 17 different stakeholders in this account, make sure that we have some consistency across that so that we get the narrative in the business case. It's bringing the team together, the account team, and sharing my perspective. And certainly your account executive and your solutions engineer are going have perspectives that are just as valuable. But for the deliverable that I'm responsible for, it's shaping that narrative and shaping that perspective so that we build something that's really effective. It's building the narrative. Chris: Mm-hmm. Mm. Alex: narrative and then the financial model, of course, right to support the business case. So there is that modeling component that I mentioned a little bit earlier that is based on all of the interviews that we had. So what are the consistent things that we're hearing that we're gonna go quantify? and then it is owning executive presentation and executive strategy. And in these large enterprise opportunities, there's a degree of multi-threading that we'll do. So for instance, they may put me with a person who has leaned into more of the financial conversation. Chris: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Alex: So that I can sort of be and represent the account team there or represent the account team when we are presenting that business case back. But when you think about it, maybe taking a step back, what I'm doing is helping our team and helping our champion of the customer have a bulletproof evaluation process. So that it's not so much about the numbers or the return on investment that is important, I want to say, but it's more about the fact that they're showing they've done their homework. We're showing we've done our homework and we've joined. come to this conclusion that our product is the product for the job. Chris: Yeah, yeah. And you mentioned sort of right at the beginning of the strategy you're involved in coming up with like who to interview and and what you're gonna ask. I'd I'd love to hear your perspective on this, but I know from the S E side of the fence I've definitely been in involved in opportunities where I've done all these interviews right with the customer. And then it's only towards the tail end of the opportunity that we suddenly think, we might actually need to put a business case together. And you know, by that Alex: Sure. Yeah. Chris: stage you can't really retrospectively go to all those people and say, hey, can we have another chat? Right. You only really get one one chance, you know, generalization. But really important in those big deals to actually think early on about how we are going to have a value narrative and and thinking about, you know, working back from what do we want to present to the customer, making sure you collect all the the data in the inputs. Alex: Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. and this is the sort of core of team selling, right? Like This is all of us coming together once we sort of identify the opportunity and say, okay, what is it that we actually need to go and do? And how do we go and do that? Right. Some people go through account planning processes at the beginning of the year. I'm a fan of that. but once you identify the opportunity, it's really just sort of building the relationship with your AE and SE counterparts, your AE manager, because they're usually fairly involved in these large opportunities and transactions as well. And then really becoming the right hand. to the account executive, the left hand to the SE, and the and maybe I'll be a little selfish and toot our horns here, the brains behind the operation, in terms of telling that narrative, but making sure that we get both the here's the narrative point we need and here's the quantitative point we need. Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Makes sense. So we've we've talked about the sort of high touch end of the spectrum. What about the other end that you mentioned earlier, thinking about scale? You said that in particular is is being impacted by AI. Like what are some of the activities you'd be doing at that end of the spectrum to enable the field? Alex: Sh. Yeah, sure. So there are two lanes that I will take this down. A lot of it is making sure that the field has the knowledge and the sort of ability to talk strategically and then also give them the capability to deliver business value assessments. So the way that we do it at Webflow is our SEs, because we're very small value consulting organization, our SEs have been the ones traditionally to bring a business value assessment to the table, and now we're instituting some more of that sort of high-touch motion as our team starts to scale. to that end, What we've spent time investing in are two products. one is the intelligence layer, one is the calculation layer. So we built a system called Jarvis, lovingly named for Iron Man. We're a bunch of nerds over here. so Jarvis is the intelligence layer. What Jarvis is, is it sort of strategy, it's a cloud-based application. It strategizes with the account executive around things that they're seeing in their deal. It's built on Chris: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Alex: value focused, right? So everything's about customer outcomes, customer, our customer's customer. but it also knows everything there is to know about our sales process, our sales cycle, our value propositions from our products, the way we quantify things. And really what Jarvis is there to do is help the account executive think through their deal and their opportunity. The way we used to do this and still to some degree do it, because it's sometimes helpful to get a human on the phone, Ronaldo Replaced by robots yet, is a program called Office Hours, where it's essentially a deal review, but it was really sort of tight and actionable in terms of here's the thing you're struggling with, here's how we get you around the corner, here's how we see around corners. And then we recorded, you know, hundreds of hours of office hours sessions and we fed that to Jarvis. So Jarvis kind of knows how to do the strategy coaching now. Chris: Mm-hmm. Interesting. Alex: So that's one of the AI applications. The other is simple business value assessment calculator that they can take in. But the thing that I'm really excited about about this tool is it's not just the calculator necessarily, right? Anybody can come up with a spreadsheet and write out return on investment number. it's what you do with it. It's how you use it in a conversation with a customer. It's how you use it to gain access to the next level in your customer. So we've put a lot of tool tips in there to help our teams actually be a little bit more effective in not just sort of saying here's the number, but here's how you actually come to that number. Here's how we co-author it with a customer, here's how you can use it to move up to power. Chris: Mm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's so important, right? Because I've seen those calculators used in the past in like the AE will tap some numbers into it and put it in front of the customer, but if they don't understand the logic behind it, if they don't understand the assumptions that it's based on, they're not able to defend it at all. When inevitably someone's gonna ask some questions about it. Alex: Yeah, a hundred percent there. And to maybe take it even one step further, what we don't want to do is be sitting on the opposite side of the table from the customer and defending a number. So we made it really transparent on how to actually sort of build and made it dynamic in the way that you build it so that the customer actually can see the process, right? So we're pulling back the curtain, allowing them inside of the process, whereas it used to be, we get a bunch of numbers, we put them in a spreadsheet, we bring it back to you, and then there's that sort of potentially adversarial conversation or or computer conversation. Chris: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Alex: Whereas here it's all about, Hey, look, we're doing this together. Let's make this happen together. Chris: Yeah, I love it. Yeah. And being transparent, you know, I've had customers in the past they say, I'm I'm not happy with that number. It's like, okay, well, like what's a range that you would be happy about? What's a minimum we could work off and a maximum? And yeah, it always always works best when it's collaborative like that. Amazing. So, Alex, you told us a bit about your sort of career today, how you landed the role at Webflow and the fact that you Alex: Hundred percent. Chris: didn't necessarily have the background in financial modeling and so on and so forth. So you've obviously been incredibly successful in your career and shaping a career as a value consultant. I'd I'd love to know two or three things that you would attribute some of that success to, whether they're, you know, habits or ways of working. Alex: Yeah. I think the biggest, there's there's probably three that come to mind. the biggest, and I'll tangent here for a second, but I promise I'll bring it back, is a phrase that I tell myself called Bobsled Jamaican. So for listeners of the podcast, if you've ever seen the movie Cool Runnings, like a nineties movie, it's about a Jamaican bobsled team going to Calgary of all places to go and compete in their first competition. Chris: Mm-hmm. Alex: In that movie, they are very much the outsiders, right? Not welcome, right? They get in a whole bar fight with the East German team. it's pretty funny. But there is a moment where the captain of the team is Chris: Mm-hmm. Alex: Enamored with the Swiss team, right? They're looking at the Swiss team, they're like, these guys are the best. We want to be like them. And the first day out, they struggle, right? They were trying to be like the Swiss, it didn't work for them. And the worst person on the team comes to the captain and said, We're Jamaican, so we a bobsled Jamaican, right? they come back out, and the second day, they blow everybody out of the water. They destroy the competition. and that always stuck with me for some reason. Again, it's kind of corny, but it always stuck with me that the phrase bobsled Jamaican means find. Find the thing that you're good at, lean into your strengths. I know there's a lot of conversation about strengths and weaknesses, and I've been over this a million times myself. Like, how do I close gaps? But there's also something to be said for sort of doubling down on the things that you are really good at, the things that joy, the things that bring you energy, because those are the problems that you'll stay up till 8, 9, 10 p.m. working on. Those are the problems that you forget to eat dinner for. So Chris: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Alex: Bobsled Jamaican is just a little moniker I keep in the back of my mind, especially when I'm feeling a little bit like a duck out of water. Sometimes like, how do I find my bobsled Jamaican? And that's probably the largest, second largest thing I'll say to contributing to my success. the second bit is relationships matter. Regardless of where you go, especially in this industry, because it's a small industry, the relationships matter, right? You build relationships, you remember people, you remember how people work with you, you remember how people treat you, they remember how you treat them. if you're leaned in, if you show up for your people, if you do all the things that are going to help somebody else be successful, that always comes back tenfold, right? Every time I've done that, every time I've gone out of my way to help somebody or talk to somebody or give them a perspective. in an opportunity or maybe on an opportunity like a job. that has always paid off in dividends for me. it's how I found I think every role that I've been in in software has come from a relationship. Chris: Couldn't agree more. Yeah. I think AEs are so much better at that, right? Because they're sort of used to having to do that relationship building and networking as as part of their roles. And the risk is with SEs, sometimes we're not so good at doing that. And if you only go to people when you need them, obviously that comes across as transactional, right? So actually being proactive and nurturing that network and relationships is is super important. Alex: And it doesn't have to be like a big thing, like I'm reaching out to get 30 minutes for you. It's I often send people LinkedIn messages when I see things that genuinely make me think of them. Right? This is the thing, and usually a conversation stems from it, or down the line, maybe three or four years, you get a call from somebody who's like, Hey, do you wanna come set up a value consulting program at at the company I'm at right now? So Chris: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Alex: It's the little things. It doesn't necessarily have to be sort of this consistently deeply intentional we have to get a thirty minute coffee chat kind of deal. Chris: Yeah. Makes sense. So Bob Sledge Jamaican, the building relationships, and you had you you said you had a third one. Alex: One more. Always forward. I got this piece of advice actually from Alan Frank, who is a great product leader who's been in the industry for a long time. I was having a conversation with him and just sort of asking him for some career advice. And one of the things that he said to me that always stuck with me is you don't have to be right, you just have to make progress. Right. and that's the beauty of the team, is a lot of people around you are gonna come with a lot of great ideas that ultimately get us to the right answer. But if you can be the person Chris: Mm-hmm. Alex: person that's always forward, it's always thinking about how do we sort of progress this. that's just as valuable, in some cases even more valuable than having the right answer. So particularly for early career professionals, this is a piece of advice that I think might be helpful because I didn't get it early career. It's like you don't have to be right. You just gotta kind of keep it moving and figure it out as you go. Chris: Mm. And is there an element there of, you know, like you have the phrase around like decision paralysis and and getting too hung up on different options and just like doubling down on one or? Alex: Yeah, I think there's like certainly decision paralysis on that. I think it's also like an agile mindset. Chris: Mm-hmm. Alex: if I'm thinking about just like software development, agile is nothing's ever done. You're putting out MVPs and you're constantly sort of iterating those MVPs into whatever the product will be. there is something to be said about making sure that if you're gonna put out an MVP, it's baked and it's not sort of riddled with errors or problems, like is a sort of base concept. But you don't have to, if you compare it to sort of the waterfall approach, you don't have to have this big, grandiose product that's you know completely baked. Chris: Mm-hmm. Alex: It's hey, let's get this out there, let's get the ideas of other people around, and then let me continue to progress this thing forward so that it becomes what it's gonna be. Chris: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's interesting you used the analogy with with Agile in software development because I I you know, I didn't come from a software development background. I remember when I was first reading about it and reading about Agile and the principles and the idea of an MVP. And that also really stuck with me, you know, applying that to e everything that you're working on could be like a presentation, it could be a meeting, but always asking yourself, Am I like, am I overdoing this? Am I Going a bit too far based on like feedback that I don't have yet, what's the bare minimum that I need to do to to start delivering value? Yeah, please do. Go for it. Alex: Can I turn the tables on you and be the podcast host for a little bit? How has that shown up for you in terms of what you've been able to put out? Chris: Yeah, I mean I think p th this podcast was probably the the best example actually, like a bit meta, right? But I remember when my first launched my business, which was back in January time, I was thinking about how am I gonna build pipeline and how I'm beginning to do marketing. And initially I was like interested in the idea of doing a podcast, but I think put off by the idea of the production value and it needs to be like really professional. but actually as I got talking to people, the more I became convinced like I I like that format, other people like that format. I know so many people, yourself included, that have these great stories to tell. So I thought, you know what, I'm just gonna like have a go. I started with Google Meet, I recorded it on you know, a laptop on a cat tree, I printed out some timings and everything, and it was like really basic, but I got some great feedback early on and yeah, it's amazing. Like that's the thing that keeps you going, right? So I'm really glad that I I took the plunge. and and you continue to iterate on it, right? Like I've got a better microphone now, I use a different camera and that sort of thing. It's I I really like the related saying that we had at Salesforce, which was better, better, never best. You know, it's like always these incremental improvements. But yeah, I hopefully that answers the question. But I think the podcast was probably the most recent thing I can think of. Alex: Well and I think it's just a great point because it's building momentum, right? And like the hardest thing the hardest part just maybe use another cliche since I'm all cliches today. Hardest part about going to the gym is getting to the gym, right? Once you're in there, the the momentum builds and all of a sudden here we are hitting goals. Chris: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I love it. So, Alex, one final question from me. If you had one piece of advice for people who are looking to get into value consulting or value g v value engineering, specifically, what would it be? Alex: Yeah. so there's a couple things. Soft skills, hard skills. I think I'll start with the soft skills, and then I'll round out with a few of the hard skills. soft skills, being willing to put yourself out there, loving visibility, loving the impact, right? Like value consulting is a high visibility, high impact role. Chris: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Alex: You're gonna be working on some of the more complex opportunities if you're value consultant. You're gonna be thinking strategically, it's a lot of fun. I I if you're have a mind for it, if you're excited about this, I say take the plunge because it is so much fun when you gonna get into it. but know that you're gonna be out there, you're gonna have to sort of lean in, you're gonna have to go find your opportunities, you're gonna have to go find your sort of business, and especially if you're program building at a smaller company, right? You you're an entrepreneur, you're the CEO of your business. Chris: Mm-hmm. Mm. Alex: so you gotta go get it and and yeah, it it's it's it's a lot of fun in that regard. The other bit in terms of hard skills to think about. of course financial modeling experience is helpful. And when I say financial modeling, it is not, you know, I'm going to the depths of doing something like an earnings finance report that is going to show up in its 10K or sort of a public statement somewhere. It's knowing the basics, it's knowing specific sort of how to how to apply levers, it's knowing about the use cases that you're Business is going to be deploying at a customer. It's knowing how to do attribution, things, terms like net present value, terms like payback period, terms like return on investment, knowing how to do that stuff. To that end, there's a ton of courses. You could probably figure it out on YouTube to be honest. You just need to spend some time learning, spend some time doing it physically, like actually sort of showing up that way. And then the last bit is presentation skills, right? In value consulting, you're gonna be in front of a lot of different audiences. You're gonna be in front of customer executives. Executives, you're gonna be in front of internal executives, you're gonna be in front of your entire sales team potentially, or if you're a larger company segment of your sales team. so being comfortable on stages, being comfortable on camera, really being able to lean in, have conversations with people in a number of different forums, whether it's a customer executive objecting to something that you're putting out there, or an internal audience that you're enabling on something, making sure that you feel good in your shoes. I'm doing that. Chris: Yeah. Awesome advice. Alex, this has been a super interesting conversation. I I I really love some of the work that you're doing on the on the scale side of things. the clawed application Jarvis that you mentioned sounds like an incredible way, right? Such a topical way to get your work and the value consulting themes into the hands of AEs. Bob Sled Jamaican, I'm gonna remember that. I love it. So yeah, thank you so much for for taking the time to share the insights with with me and everyone listening to the podcast today. Alex: No, Chris, thanks for the opportunity, man. It's always my pleasure to be able to do this with you and give back to the community. Chris: You're more than welcome. you for listening to PreSales Pathways. If you found this episode helpful, please do follow or subscribe to the show on whichever platform you use to get your podcasts. If you can think of someone else that would find the show helpful, please share it with them. And last but not least, you can find even more resources, including a free pre-sales Pathfinder tool to explore different pre-sales career paths at chrisjamesclark.co.uk. Until next time, thank you.