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Should AEs Prospect? A CRO Who Says No · Rev-n-u Unplugged

• james: Hello and welcome to Rev-nu Unplugged. This week I'm joined by Aviv, CRO at Datarails Aviv didn't come up through sales, he spent years in marketing, and three years ago the founders asked him to take on sales as well. As he puts it, suddenly he had no one left to blame. We talk about how he built a revenue engine that runs a bit like a factory. He works back from the target to exactly how many meetings he needs and what each one costs. We also have a proper debate about whether AEs should prospect at all. His A's don't, and he makes a strong case for why. We also get into selling to CFOs on Facebook and TikTok, and there's a panda involved. It's a cracking conversation, and I think you'll take a lot from it. If you enjoy it, please do like and subscribe because it generally helps the show. Right, let's get to it. This is Rev-n-u Unplugged with Aviv Aviv, welcome to Rev-n-u Unplugged. It's great to have you on the show. it's the platform where we interview some of the greatest CROs from around the world. So well done for joining that club. How does it feel being part of that community? Aviv Canaani: Feels amazing. Happy to be here and happy to chat with you today. james: Brilliant. Well, we've got some really interesting topics to go into your journey from marketing into the CRO seat. We're going to be talking about building the revenue engine. Really, really good debate about AEs and whether they should be prospecting. I'm looking forward to to getting into that. but before we we start going into those topics, Aviv if you could just give our audience a bit of a background as to to who you are so they know what we're here to talk about. Aviv Canaani: Awesome. All right, so I'm Aviv Canaani I'm the chief revenue officer at DataRails, the number one financial operating system for the office of the CFO. We sell to CFOs and SMBs and mid-market companies. And I'm managing here sales, marketing, account management, and partnerships and a lot of other things, everything revenue related. And yeah, love being here. Daro's been here for five years now. james: the first topic is from marketing into the CRO seat. And I guess the first thing I'd like to understand from you after decades in in marketing, when did you actually realise that you might want to step up into a revenue role? Aviv Canaani: never. Like it just happened. actually like I'll give you like the background, like how it came about and why I'm so excited james: Yeah. Aviv Canaani: about my existing position, although I never envisioned it. So I was leading marketing at a different startup. And one day one of the co-founders of Data Rails reached out to me. apparently he already built a billion-dollar company, so I looked him up. I'm like, okay, hopefully, like this is gonna be his second unicorn. The company was a couple of million ARR when I joined. And he was saying, like, try to build marketing here. Let's see what happens. The company was 90% outbound, and he said, try to build marketing. Five years later, We're 90% inbound. We built like an amazing marketing led machine that fills the calendars of the account executives with meetings. And based on that, about three years ago, we had a time we didn't have a VP sales for a while, and the co founders approached me and asked me like if I want to take that over in addition to marketing takeover sales. So there would be one person overseeing everything from lead to closed one. The only problem is now I Had no one to blame for not closing my amazing leads. And as the head of sales, I can't blame marketing for all these crappy leads that they sent us. so yeah, we've been going on that journey for the past three years. I joined the company as a series A. Now we're like we recently raised a series C, grew a lot. And to your question, is I didn't expect this, but I love what I'm doing now because I'm fully accountable and have full ownership of building the revenue machine, not only being in charge of the revenue. Growth like a lot of other sales leaders, but also being charged with the cost of acquisition and how efficient the machine is. james: talk me through that transitional year when you were moving from VP of marketing to owning sales as well. For any marketing leader that might be looking to do the same route, what was that year like? What did you learn along the way? Aviv Canaani: Yeah, it was tough. So when I took over, we had just about six account executives. And now we have like 25. And we didn't have anyone like managing the team. We had to let go of the person that was managing that team. And I all of a sudden was managing six account executives. Never did that in my life. The first thing I did was the account executive that I really trusted. I promoted her to be a team lead. few years later, like now she's a VP managing all the twenty-five account executives. and some of the other account executives like are now also like directors. but at the beginning it was very challenging because I had to build that kind of trust with the team. All of a sudden this marketing guy is in charge of sales. You can imagine that some of the team didn't like it as much. And I think it's important like to be humble when you start and and do something like that. Like I'll give you an example. Like at the beginning, I was questioning them a lot about why they're not moving forward with some meetings they had and are not marking them as opportunities and set scheduling like a demo. I thought it's like the right process, you know, to make sure that they do that. But apparently it took me time to understand that they were thinking I'm trying to like mix up like or mess with the numbers to show as if marketing is doing a great job of setting like a great pipeline and like the sales team is screwing up james: Hmm. Aviv Canaani: and not closing them, which was never my goal, but I didn't look at it, you know, from their perspective. So it definitely took some time to build that kind of trust and build the kind of team that I wanted. And I think one of the main challenges was also like when you manage marketing, it's all about the systems that you use. You know, the LinkedIn campaigns don't have feelings if you know double the investment or decrease it. But when you have to work with people, I'm trying to look at everything as one revenue machine, but with people it's different and it's not that easy when you let someone go or you promote someone or you don't promote someone. someone else and that's something I had to learn with time. james: And so I'd like to talk about the lady you said that you promoted into a a lead position who's now the the VP. At what point did you realize that you needed a sales leader? And for somebody that and I might be guessing here, so correct me if I'm wrong, has either zero or limited experience in hiring salespeople. I'm interested to know what you were analysing and assessing to know that. They were the right person to promote. Because it's a tough one, isn't it? Aviv Canaani: Yeah, no, definitely. yeah, so I think what I saw in her was not only was she one of our best salespeople, but he had a strategic view and great interpersonal skills. And I think in that regard it is some things that are similar across, you know, different roles that you wanna hire first of all people who have it in them. To be managers, have the potential of doing that. you know, like everything that you do as an executive, it's you know, you're taking risks and or bets, you know, on this one it really paid off. But I knew from the beginning, that's why I promoted her to be team lead. At no point did I think that I'm like this great salesperson, I'm gonna review now all the costs of the sales team and start talking with them about like how they can do better discovery and medpic and so on. So I needed someone to fit into that role. And you know, with time, we saw you know it's working out with her, so we also promoted to direct her and later VP, but she had to earn it. You when I first promoted a team lead, I had no idea she would eventually become a VP. But there was also other people on the team that later got promoted to team lead and director, and some people that it didn't work out with them. the way I see it, and I know it, it's like you think you only think about everything like as an executive, just like a CEO doesn't necessarily have like both product experience and sales experience or marketing experience, also like as a marketing leader. Marketing is based on a lot of different fashions, like You can be an expert that came up from product marketing, but you have no idea how to run a Facebook campaign or how to write like a blog post or you know, it can go like in for Different directions, but you need to be able to find the right kind of talent to do it. Like I again, like I'm coming like from like years of being like a marketing leader. I'm not running marketing campaigns myself. I'm not like looking at how like we're creating audiences and a LinkedIn campaign, but it doesn't mean I can't manage marketing. I know how to find the right people that can do it and I know the lingo of like how to talk about it, how to see if something's working or not working. But I think it's completely fine that you understand that you're not necessarily the smartest person in the room for every different topic, and I'm not. for sure the best salesperson in the team, far from it, but I know how to find like the right talent to manage it. james: And in that first year, that transitional year, how did you manage to balance not being on team marketing side for everything? And also making sure that you put your time into the right place? Because obviously marketing is your would have been your passion. It's something that you've been seriously successful at, and something you enjoyed doing. So how did you suddenly go, right? I need to have my marketing hat on and then I need to have my r revenue hat on. How did you balance it? Aviv Canaani: Yeah, so luckily for me when I managed marketing, I had two great leads there, one for leading growth and one leading content or brand. That I just trusted that you know they can still manage it. Actually, back then, like the company was based like half in the US and half in Israel. I was in Israel. I moved to the US to be closer with the sales team while the marketing team is in Israel. And I trusted them to keep running the team and doing what they do best so I can really focus now 80% of my time in sales. Now it's like much more balanced. so there's a lot of like advice, I think. Which is how you can fire yourself from your previous role. I think that's what I was able to do. It's like if you build the right kind of team structure with the right individual contributors and team leads and directors and VPs, you can move on and take more responsibilities. Which james: Yeah. Aviv Canaani: I think in the one hand sounds obvious, but I think for a lot of people it's hard because they think that like if they're gonna let go, people can fire them, like the CEO can fire them because they're not doing anything themselves, like they just hand it out to someone else. But no, like once you're able to build this kind of machine, you can move on to the next thing. And this is what I now really passionate about. If you ask me what I enjoy most about my role, whether it's marketing or sales, it's it's neither. It's like building this kind of revenue machine where everything works together to build a company that can generate profitable, efficient growth. james: Yeah, and we're gonna get into that because I think it's super interesting. what would you say was the biggest blind spot that marketers have about sales that you didn't discover until you were in sales? Aviv Canaani: hmm. I think how hard it is to be like a salesperson. It's james: Yeah. Aviv Canaani: very easy in theory to look at, you know, the sales training, teaching someone how to run a demo, doing discovery, moving things from one step to another, but actually sitting on the seat. going on calls, multiplying mo call intercalls with clients, moving them from one step to another is there's a lot of art to it that is much more than just science because again, like I mentioned, I I'm most passionate about like, you know, the science of revenue architecture, but You need an art to it, and some people maybe know it great in theory, but doing it as practice is hard. And when I joined, you know, a few sales scholars, like some weren't better, some w weren't as good and you know, thinking on your feet, building that kind of trust and relationship. some things are very hard to just teach, some things are innate and other things you just you have to practice a lot to be good at them. james: before we move on to the next topic, I guess this is a hard one for you to to answer, but I would love to get your opinion on what the founders saw and thought when giving you this opportunity. Because if you look at most businesses, particularly the critical stage that they were at when you were handed the keys to the whole revenue business, if you talk to any VC, they'll tell you to go and get someone who's been there, done it, got the t-shirt. And the thought of hiring someone that has not led a sales team to take control of a business at such a critical time would most normally be laughed out the room. But yet the founders have hired a person who's got a capability. So what would be your thought process when you're having those conversations as to why? they should be looking at a person rather than a copycat skill set. Aviv Canaani: Yeah, first of all, I don't know, maybe it's a question to ask them, but I think what they saw was like that during the initial phases when the company grew, they hired all these experienced VP sales that were very expensive and try to take the company like to the next level in ways that were also very you know, not as efficient. although like they were great, like they built the foundation for what we have now. But I think that's happens a lot with like CEOs of startups, especially when things get a bit sour. And for example, like when I took over, it's not like once we were in like this amazing scale time, like it was just after like we had layouts. That's we we didn't like a VP sales, we needed to change the system. I think first of all it was efficient having me do both roles like with one salary. but also james: Yeah. Aviv Canaani: like I was always very involved in the discussions with the sales team and with the CEO and the other co-founders and like what I think needs to happen. I was there like in the SKOs and all these processes, so they know like my thought process. And they were trying to be efficient about it and they knew like that I was able to build this kind of machine that anyway generated all the meetings that were j creating revenue for james: Yeah. Aviv Canaani: the skills people. So just like one other step, you know, to to take over, you know, that kind of revenue machine. But definitely it was like a risk on their end to try something like that. But I have to add that you also see it in other companies. There's this whole growth in this kind of role of the CRO. In other places you put marketing under a salesperson that became a CRO. So I think it has to do more of like the actual person more more more than like if they have the sales experience, the marketing experience, james: Yeah. Aviv Canaani: RevOps experience. yeah, so it's it's all about the james: Yeah, totally. Totally agree with that. well, we're gonna talk about now building the revenue engine. to start with, could you just walk me through the waterfall practice? so that people understand that. And then I want to understand is you start with targets, how far back do you work? and then we'll come on to how often you rebuild. But the first bit is waterfall practice. Talk us, talk us through this. Aviv Canaani: So I think what worked for us in the past few years, especially since they took over sales, is that I'm I think I'm able to deliver to the CEO and the board what they're expecting, which is I have a revenue target, I know what I need to get there. And that's my advice also to like other CROs. It's not about the excuses. A lot of them don't care, like you know, the board or the CO about how the sausages are being made. It's if james: Mm-hmm. Aviv Canaani: I have target, let's say five million dollars a quarter, I know based on ISP how much you know revenue, like how many deals we need to bring in. I know how many meetings we need to generate, how many opportunities we need to generate, and then of course deals. And because and we can elaborate on that later, like our Account executives don't even prospect. I know exactly how many meetings I to generate for them. And since everything came for marketing, I know the cost per meeting. So I know if the you know the cost per meeting, for example, is like $2,000. I can make like, you know, the math of exactly how many meetings I need to generate. I know how 50% of them become opportunities. You know, let's say 30%, you know, become deals. I can do the math. And that's how we were able to build this in a way that I would just say, like, this is the budget I need to get to that number. And last year, like three out of four quarters, like. we were able to get to the number within the 5% difference of like exactly what I anticipated to what we actually got based on this kind of waterfall model where every part of the machine knows exactly what they're doing. It's more like the Henry Ford kind of factory system. james: which input into this is the hardest to forecast accurately? Is it meeting to opportunity, conversions, or opportunity to close? Where's the biggest challenge for you? Aviv Canaani: Huh, I think it's I guess like it's all of them. if I go one by one, I think the cost per meeting is challenging because it tends to grow. Like, you know, all these platforms are increasing their cost in the past few years, like LinkedIn and Google and Facebook are increasing the cost. So you have to take that into account also if you Have increased revenue targets, it's difficult to estimate like the marginal dollar how efficient is it's gonna be because you know the more you spend, it's gonna be less efficient. That's usually the main thing like I focus on and try to figure out how to make it work. By the way, it can either come from marketing or for outbound VDRs, which is again maybe a little bit easier to forecast. And in terms of meaning to qualify opportunities, it's more or less stable every now and then we make a change. for example, if our ICP, so that's more steady also an opportunity to close one is based on you know more or about what we're doing in the product, how we're trading the team. but that's like the thing I'm most passionate about because that's one of the things where like a one percent increase can really make a dent and also like we spoke up before about the difference between marketing and sales and marketing like it's much more clear like the results you're gonna get in sales like you see like I mentioned conversion from opportunity to close one you see a big difference among account executives and then you want to figure out like how do we take the best practices with the best account executives and get it to the rest of the team but you know it's something like easier said than done. I wish I could like replicate you know our best performance and everyone else can just do that. But there's a reason some people are at the top and some aren't. It's that's one of the things like I wish I w would be better at like in terms of like figuring out how to do a better job at like, you know, we're improving, but it's james: Hmm. Aviv Canaani: yeah, it's difficult. james: So on that, is it is there a way that you stress test the model, particularly when a channel is underperforming mid quarter? do you rebalance how the waterfall process is, or do you still hold the account executive effectively accountable for the number that was set out? Aviv Canaani: So I hold the account executive like responsible for the number that was set up. It's on, I just had this discussion with my marketing team. I told them like if no, if your expectation is to generate this amount of meetings, you need to make it work. Like LinkedIn doesn't work, james: Yeah. Aviv Canaani: move money to Facebook, like do something else. Like we need to generate more meetings and outbound, let's move more meetings and outbound. But we have to set that amount of meetings. I know like maybe where you're heading with this, like for that kind of executives. It depends, you know so one quarter they may get like a hundred, hundred and ten meetings a quarter. Another one it might be eighty. so it's challenging, right? Because the account executive is kinda reliant on marketing or in the BDRs. That said, the way I explain it to the team is like it's a team sport. Like you only win if everyone works well together. It's you know, think about like the metaphor I use is with you know, like John Stockton is the all time fair enough, the the one that made like the most assists in his careers. james: Yeah. Aviv Canaani: in the For those who don't follow, like in the NBA, what is an assist? Like we pass the ball to someone else and he scores. There is no metric for how many great passes someone did. If the people he would like the teammates that he would pass the ball to wouldn't make the shots, he wouldn't be on the all-time high of the most assists in NBA history. So it's the same thing. The AE's are reliant on marketing and SDRs. james: Love it. so coming from a marketing background, do you weigh the top of the waterfall? So like the pipe chun generation differently than sales leaders who've got a more traditional sales background? Aviv Canaani: What what do you james: So so pipe pipeline generation is critical to to technology businesses. So do you put more value on within the pipeline, within the waterfall process that you have with pipeline generation from marketing rather than account executives filling their own pipeline? Aviv Canaani: Yeah, yeah. So like my whole focus on is on generating pipeline. The way I see the pipeline can come from three different directions. It can come from inbound, which is marketing, outbound, you know, BDRs SDR, and partnership team. And I try to estimate in a way that like I make sure that the pipeline is full. because in our model, which I know it can be contested, I believe like in SMB and mid market sales, I don't want the account executive to spend time trying to generate their own meetings. I want them, again, like thinking about the Henry Ford factory. It's like I want them to just go from one meeting to the next meeting. Like I mentioned, our team can do like 900 meetings like a quarter, which is I think like a lot. james: Yeah. Aviv Canaani: And their goal is to sell, not to prospect. Just like I think prospecting became really hard in the past few years. I'd rather have an e experts working on it, whether it's BDRs or marketing, generate the meetings, and have the S salespeople focus on actually selling. james: and we're we're definitely going to come on to that on the on the next topic. before we do that, when you designed the the waterfall model to to fit for for your business, was there any early mistakes that you would warn any CRO that wants to follow in your footsteps and implement something similar that you would warn them about avoiding? Aviv Canaani: Yeah. Hmm. So first like you have to make sure that, you know, the top of the final works, that you're generating the meetings and everything becomes easier because setting the later expectations with account executives explain why they don't don't have enough meetings is challenging. I think one of the mistakes I did was sometimes like hiring too many account executives. I'd rather be in a model where first of all, like you know, we don't have any room in the calendar, then we hire another account executive, be very sensitive about it. Like I mentioned, it's much easier closing a LinkedIn campaign than letting go of an account executive. I think like sometimes like we moved too fast in that regard. And also maybe separating. That's one of the things I recently came to the understanding, separating between meetings that are coming from outbound and inbound. And now we have like separate teams. The ones that like account executives that are working with outbound leads and ones that are working with inbound leads. Because if you try to fill someone's calendar with a mix of inbound and outbound, like they I think they get used to inbound. And you know it's more like becomes like more cherry picking or working with the ones that anyway raise your hand that are interested. And think you have to deal with outdoor meetings very differently and just expecting the county executives to do something very different in every meeting is is challenging. So again, like talking about this kind of factory thing, like even separated like these funnels, even more. james: Love it. It's all about process, which makes a lot of sense. and you can put science and maths behind it. So we're gonna move into the AE prospecting debate. So you just mentioned it there, you don't believe that SMB mid market AE should prospect at all. So firstly, what convinced you of that when you became a leader? And was there any specific results after that that proved you were right? Aviv Canaani: Yeah, I think that the the fastest growing company in our space. I know that the quota that our account executives have is what's what they have a quarter is some of our competitors have in one year. I'd rather james: wow. Aviv Canaani: have a machine that is less like headcount related. And trying to get the most out of people. also trying to think to educate the account executives so many different pro parts of like how to prospect and all that's so hard, especially when people don't pick up phone calls these days, you get into spam mailboxes, whether it's like a calls or emails, it's just hard. it much more difficult than it was like five years ago. I think it's easier to again to scale if you know like exactly how much pipeline you need to generate as opposed to just hiring a lot of account executives hoping for the best. And I again like I spoke with account executives that are competitors. I can imagine there's a big difference in what do we expect them. And for people that I was able to convince on top performance to move to our company They know they can make more money here. And also they mentioned that in other companies, like kind of executives, some of them work harder, some you know, go to the gym during the day and do some other like things because you know the target isn't that high. It's very demanding, you know, to try to do like prospecting. I'd rather have people that are super hungry, that are willing to do like five, six calls a day. and It's it's just a very different environment. Also, like maybe one more thing I wanna add. I also spoke with some people, like le sales and marketing leaders in some of the top companies, like Rippling and Monday and others, and I know like that's how it works there as well. So that's like what I'm trying to follow in the footsteps of companies that are already building dollar businesses. james: So so how does it work? You you mentioned that some month some quarters they might have a hundred and ten meetings and others they might have eighty. So if they're capable of doing a hundred and ten and they've effectively got thirty less meetings in a quarter, what are they doing in the time that they would have been doing meetings that they're now not doing meetings? Are they going to the gym? Aviv Canaani: Great question. Great question. That's something I also want to know. but like james: Ha ha. Aviv Canaani: why like it's so important for us to make sure the machine operates in a more sufficient way. Recently, we decided that the minimum threshold should be ninety and we're doing everything possible to make sure we get to ninety. But it's also like there there's two ways like extremes to look at it. On the one hand, yeah, for sure, like if people don't have meanings, like what are they gonna do? The other challenge that we had in the other Side of that spectrum. We had even quarters of summer account executive had like 120, 130 meetings, so even 140. And then I wasn't even sure about like our conversion rates if it's hurts them. Because if you have like four intro callers one after another, are you really putting like 100% into every one of them? Because you know, the james: Hm. Aviv Canaani: like I mentioned, let's say meeting costs like let's say $2,000. I I'd rather have more account executives like and have more buffer and have them time to do like follow-ups properly. or prepare for cost. So that's why like you were more or less like in the 90 range now. But it's not exact science. That's something I'm always like trying to think about and trying to see like how we can make it as effective as possible. james: So how does that first bit work? Who's building that pipeline? Who's booking the meetings for these AE's Do you have SDRs? Is it all marketing? Do you have the bot agent SDRs? What's your what's your magic to get these eighty, ninety, hundred meetings in the AE's calendars? Aviv Canaani: Yeah, so it used to be almost everything like marketing and the marketing would s generate all the leads that the SDRs would schedule. From the marketing side, I can say that like with time created more and more automations using tools like Chili Piper and others, where I would say like about eighty percent of our meetings now, A prospect can schedule directly a call with an AE. There's no need for an SDR. because you know, we qualified on the forum. Like we ask them all the questions on their company size, their title, and so forth. What we do use the SDRs for is like for all the ones we're not sure about. Sometimes you could call it like a tier two. So then like an SDR would follow up and ask a few more, you know, more specific questions about, you know, if they have them on a budget and you know, if they're open, you know, to the price and a few other things and you know how Have authority to make a decision. and you know, we're constantly trying to figure out how to make that part more efficient. I would also say that what I did like when I took over, like what was it, like more three than three years ago, also we moved all the SDR team, the inbound SDR team to the Philippines to make it more efficient. I outbound we're still having like people in the US and Europe, but I think an inbound the Filipino team is amazing and more efficient. And in outbound, yeah, it's like B VRs are scheduling calls. I guess like, you know, in other companies as well. you know, booking meetings and qualifying them and booking them for the team. james: So talk me through how the marketing generated these meetings. So they took ownership of emails, creating lists to to send out. So they were owning effectively what the ICP is. Who's gonna who's gonna get it? Yeah. Aviv Canaani: Yes, yes. So yeah, we also have RevUps under marketing. So they're the one creating the lists. They're targeting them. Again, I have to reiterate something I mentioned. It's SMB and mid-market. When you have like a huge town, this model works. So like we have james: Yeah. Yeah. Aviv Canaani: we are saying to the office of the CFO, every company from 50 to let's say 2,000 employees or above. That's more than 100,000 companies in our town. If my target was like 200 companies or 500, this would probably not work. And I would ask the account executives to prospect. Okay. So it's important to mention I don't think this james: Yeah. Yeah. Aviv Canaani: is a blank statement of what I'm saying. And just like because the total addressable market is so big, I want to do things that are very broad. And that's why I also james: Yeah. Aviv Canaani: wrap up sits like marketing. And then we decide, like, you know, what makes more sense for LinkedIn campaigns, for Facebook campaigns, you for outbound. but they own the list and the account executives don't even have territory. like it's a 100% round Robin. Like they get a lead, they need to work it. james: So that's interesting. So how does it it totally round Robin? How does that how do you decide who's getting them? How do you I guess put out the fires of people saying they got the better leads for these opportunities? And I I I'm guessing you're not industry, you're not geography geographically focused or industry focused in a world where Consultation, advice, guidance seems to be key. Probably more at enterprise level. You may say, Look, this is mid market, so we don't need it. So people don't need to be total specialists, they just need to understand what the product's gonna do and how it will affect their ROI, I I guess, in what they're doing. Aviv Canaani: Yeah, exactly. So first of all the only something we just started like two years ago, we could do regions just like you US and Canada as opposed to like Europe that's like different account executives. I never understood, to be honest, the difference why you need to have like a East Team, West team and stuff like that. It's you know, it can be like the same companies anyway, people now are getting on Zoom calls. It's something you have to travel again, putting aside like enterprise. So in terms of territories, that's not something like I believe in. we do have tier one and tier two leads. Like I mentioned, you the ones that SDRs need qualify. So there is also different quotas for the senior and principal AEs that are taking all the tier one leads as opposed to the ones taking the tier two leads. And of course if you know you prove yourself you could eventually get the tier one leads. so we try to create this kind of system where again like we try to bug like a different categories and try to like extract the most out of every lead that comes in and yeah it's not obvious it's like things we adapt this all the time to to make it work but again it I think it works for what we're doing and I have to mention this is also what I understood that it works for some of the top billion dollar unicorn companies. I'm interested like Crippling Money there's like a few others they spoke with Where I think in terms of the expertise, it's like maybe I'm not looking for the A to be an expert. I'm james: Yeah. Aviv Canaani: looking now about the solution consultants, like at what point they need to be experts. but I don't think like we're there yet. But I think as we grow, like it would make more sense to do it. We're still like a relatively like small team. Like if we really expand, like I would consider doing more specializations. james: Makes sense. how exactly do you split the SDR AE handover? want to sort of like really understand where does the SDR or what does the SDR need to hand to an AE before the AE treats it as a proper meeting, a proper pipeline opportunity? Aviv Canaani: yeah, so we have a very specific SLA that the SDR needs to follow. they set the meetings in the calendars for the account executives, like you mentioned, it's like around Robin. And this is also gonna be interesting for you in the audience. Like the county executive has to take the meeting. No question about it, no pushing back. Because again, it's a machine and we don't want to make sure the machine is working. About half of those meetings become opportunities. If at the account executive got a meeting that is not in the ICP, they need to mark it as prospect irrelevant and then the SDR doesn't get the credit, but they need to give that feedback back, you know, to the SDR. so you know we learn in the future not to do it anymore. And it's for every part of the funnel. Like for example, you know, we work with solution consultants because we have a more technical product. So after a good you know intro call, in the second call you'd have a solution consultant showing the demo. We used to have also solution consultants pushing back. on you know the quality that they got from the account executives and I mentioned the same thing. It's like the solution consultant cannot ask questions. Like they need to take the meeting. If it wasn't good, okay, push back. Like let's have this discussion with the directors and the the account executive and the solution consult team because I don't want to create the this kind of situation where before meetings everyone pushes back. Why did they get this meeting? Why did they get that meeting? It's like if you got a meeting and it's like the machine worked. If it didn't, again you can market prospect relevant. It doesn't count for you in terms of like you know the number of meetings you did. But It has to it's had to work like a machine. It can't be like everyone decides for themselves what they're getting. james: i I don't know if if this has happened where you've had peer to peer conversations, go to networking events, but is there a counter argument that you hear most from other revenue leaders? And where do you think they're wrong with their counter arguments? Aviv Canaani: Yeah, so I hear from of course like other sales leaders and maybe it helps that I'm not in salesman, but maybe it's a disadvantage or advantage that you know there is this discussion about how AE's need be self-reliant, just like you mentioned, it's a good point. Like what if they don't get enough meetings in their calendar? And a lot of them agree that, you know, they need to fill the calendars based on BDRs and marketing and so forth. But the the everyone still says, or not that everyone, like some of them still say, like, you know, 10, 20% of what an accounting city does still needs to be prospecting. I feel it's like maybe like I'm trying to be controversial. It's like it's machismo kind of stuff, of like why? Like, because you see all these posts also on LinkedIn on like, you AE saying, like, you know, I never want to be reliant on you know the BDRs or in marketing. But like you said, it's like It's a team sport. I want the machine to work as efficiently as possible. And going back to the Henry Ford like machine is like a factory thing, there's one part that you know generates, you know, the tires and all that and like connects the tires. Like it can be a few different parts. Like it has to all work together. Like if they are starting to prospect, it means like I need to buy them the tools to prospect, I need to teach them how to prospect. I need to do a lot of other things like to make that happen. I'd rather focus on making my BDRs better. And you better training them and so forth. Are they reliant? Yeah, but you know, it is what it is. The same thing you know marketing leaders can say about sales. And I'm sure like if we have like all the marketing people listening to the podcast would say that, you know, we're genuinely all this amazing pipeline, everything's great, and the sales doesn't know how to close it. But no, like if I and this is like my message to CMOs out there. If you're meeting your targets in terms of pipeline and the sales team doesn't close it, it doesn't matter. You still fail. james: Hm. Aviv Canaani: Like if the company doesn't generate revenue, you're gonna get fired. Like the company is not gonna be successful. So everything has to work together. I'll just finish, I'll say that, you know, the first class in business school is like the marketing sales funnel. It's one funnel, it's not a two separate funnel. james: Yeah. Aviv Canaani: Either it works or it doesn't. So yeah, so I want to make sure it's as efficient as it can possibly be. james: So was DataRail running this way before you became responsible for sales or or was this something that you brought in once you became responsible for sales? Aviv Canaani: Yeah, it's it's a great point. So I have to say, it is part of a vision also of the founders. when they started it, they would just schedule a lot of the meetings for the kind of exact just based on BDRs. It used to be 90% outbound, but outbound meeting like BDRs which schedule it for AE. So I did step into an environment that highly encouraged that. Also, but I I have to say in my previous startup work case in the field service management space, it's like a compiler of service titan. We also did that. So I had this experience even before. so it's not something like I came in and I completely changed, you know, the operational system of the company. But I do believe in the CEO thinks the same way as I do that in order to continue to grow the company, we need to continue with this kind of methodology as opposed to getting like the AE's to have this material, like okay like they need to james: Yeah. Aviv Canaani: schedule ten, twenty percent of their meetings, but I don't know. I'm always looking for more ideas and always open for more feedback and you know we change things all the time based on the the results we're getting. james: So obviously you said and you y you stressed there that this is a process that is working in mid market sales. Why wouldn't it be the same at enterprise? Aviv Canaani: Good question. First of all, I to admit, I didn't work in a company that focuses on enterprise, so I'm not an expert. I think a lot of it you can do in enterprise, but speaking with other sales leaders and marketing leaders and companies that have like a more limited total addressable market, let's say like 500 companies, I'm just making it up. I think this kind of mass marketing is Isn't as efficient because you know, you can really target these specific people. You can find out like which events they go to, invite them to all these specific dinners, like I had this i idea where let's say like you have only five hundred accounts, like you start a podcast and like your podcast and about this very specific niche topic of you know, client, you do like weekly podcasts. Okay, so within like you know, a few years you just reach out, you know, to everyone in your target audience and you know you work to for to someone's, you know, only ego of speaking in a podcast and you know you can reach them. But I can't do something like that when I have like a target audience of a hundred thousand companies. I have to do things that can really scale. but Again, I think it's it's a mix. I c I guess if I would work with the enterprise company, I would still do some marketing, but I would try to be very creative in how we get in front of those very specific accounts that we need to own. james: Love that. I I think it's a super interesting place. And I think look, if your AEs do have no spare time because their meetings are f their their days are filled with meetings, it makes it makes perfect sense. So it's not that you I guess the answer to this is not that you don't believe they should prospect, is they shouldn't have time to prospect because the meeting should be there for them to to do the next stage of it. Because if they're spending more time on meetings, I guess statistically and data led wise, they're more likely to close more than if they're spending thirty percent of their time trying to get the meetings. Aviv Canaani: Yeah, exactly. there's even like this discussion I've been hearing like in different podcasts now about, you know, with AI, talking about how like if you want to build a official organization, one of the things you may need to measure is how much of your salesperson's time is focused on actually selling. So in our model, they're focused much more on selling. If you just count the amount of hours or actually talking with clients, is much higher than like our competitors. and I would even take it to the next level in terms of like leveraging AI, like we're trying to yeah. Maybe didn't mention this. Like when I took over sales, one of the things that also really bothered me is the salespeople like don't update sales force. You it's like common thing. But rather than like keep on pushing on them, which they tried a lot at the beginning, now we automate all this. We use like a tool called Momentum that updates everything, even mentions you know who are the different competitors. Rather than like push salespeople to like update things and CRMs, I want to really have them focus as much as possible on selling. So if they don't need to prosper, also don't need to update sales force, they don't need to do or creating different functions. Campaigns and so forth, I can automate things for them. Like I'd rather automate as many things as possible. I'll even it say that. I've been hearing like some sales leaders saying that when they hire account executives, you're looking for the AI knowledge, how they can run you know their own campaign. So I think on the one hand it's nice, but I really believe in centralizing it. It means like if the AE's, if an A found out something that really works well, okay, that really helps them close deals, I want to take it back to my re main RevOps team and then generate something that all the AE's can use. I don't want like every AE to start like doing you know their own thing. It's just not efficient. I want them to come up with ideas. I they do have access to cloud to do things. But once it works, let's give it to everyone and make their job as efficient as possible. james: It's great. so moving on to the the last topic, wanted to touch on who data release to. You sell to CFOs, which I I think is quite a challenging market to to sell into. one of the things like particularly where you've got this marketing team and the SER team building that funnel and and and booking these meetings. When we were were talking in preparation for this, you talked about how you spend money on Facebook and TikTok. And I'll be really honest with you, I would not see a CFO sat on either of those. So what did you see that saw that you should spend money on that? And then what convinced you to actually spend money to to to get the returns? Aviv Canaani: Yeah, that's great question. It's get that off. not a lot of people know, but CFOs also have personality and a sense of humor. And I took that inspiration when I started actually from Gong and the great creative they've been doing. I'm sure like if I like some of the stuff you know they've been creating, both in organic as well as paid. I think people are Interesting and and like you're in like content that is relevant for them. Like we create like funny ads and content that is like james: Yeah. Aviv Canaani: jokes between controllers and FPNA managers. It's like as niche as you can do them. And you'd be surprised that like one of our main channels, or maybe even our best channel, is Facebook and Instagram. We even r run TikTok. And you would see like people are saying, not only like do we see it in the marketing attribution, but people see on calls. Like I see ads all the time. Because even even now, like you we have a mascot. We call him like Bob Sheetner. you see it's like I I have him here, like Bob Sheetner, james: Mm-hmm. Aviv Canaani: because you it's a F banda, like F P and A, that's what we sell. So F B A And DA is like panda. So this is james: Like it. Aviv Canaani: Bob Sheetner. And apparently we're doing like a lot of crazy things with him. And now we had like an outbound call talking about like attribution, where the client said, I see Bob Sheetner all the time in ads. And now we're creating like a fun like video for him based on like Bob Sheetner because people like to be entertaining. Like people, and again, like something that people would be surprised about what I expect about CFOs is that when they're sitting at home and they're bored. They're probably doom scrolling Instagram and not ebooks for CFOs. Like, you know, they're human beings, just like the rest of james: You'd like it. Aviv Canaani: the bus. So I wanna get in front of them once they do it. And and it's tough, you know, they're looking at all their favorite like celebrities and politicians and comedians. So the content needs to be really good and entertaining that to get them to click and super hyper-focused on them. james: So and just linking onto that, you're also selling into the person that has the purse strings for the whole business. And you know, I'm probably not too far off when I throw out a stat that 90% of their job is to prevent spend, Aviv Canaani: Yes. james: and telling the rest of the business that they can't buy things. How do you in that early engagement? get these guys bought in that A, look, it's a fun thing to click on and do, but actually draw their attention that this is something they should give time to to spend money. 'Cause they don't like doing that. Aviv Canaani: Yeah. That's that's definitely a challenge. Like I I can't ignore it. I wanna pique their attention with again great content and showing them like what's possible with software like ours and how much time it can save for their team, creating less errors, how they can be better at their jobs rather than like having like a month end closed process that like takes them like it's like three weeks to end it to finish, like it can take them like a day. Or you know, they don't wanna be in a situation where they present to the board like wrong numbers, talking about like all the capabilities we have or So like if they work with AI and Cloud, how actually like if they work with us, we can create the financial database that they can actually trust as opposed to having to double check Claude to make sure they create the right data. But it's hard. So like I think every part of the process when we talk about the waterfall model is getting you to the next phase. So when Facebook ads or LinkedIn or whatever, just getting the attention of like, you know, check out like a demo. Like why not? Like get in the front of a call. After like the intro calls, like, okay, like we'll have a you know, solution consultant actually personalize a demo, something specifically for your industry that's relevant based on your point. You know, one step after another to really get them to eventually buy. But yeah, it's difficult. Like they are the ones really, you know, trying to keep you know, the company's money and not spending too much. So So you know they're hard negotiators that can really push back on a lot of different things. But on the other hand, there is an advantage that they're also the ones that approve the budget. So you know, if you convince them that it's good, like you don't need to convince anyone else. james: This is true. and before I let you get back to your day job, any advice for a B2B marketer who assumes serious buyer means boring channel? you've like literally in the last few minutes kind of just shown a little bit of the excitement and fun around actually what you guys are doing. But I think a lot of it where particularly when it comes to a serious buyer and and business. they think that everybody's on the boring channel. So what advice would you give to them to to look outside of that? Aviv Canaani: look at the companies that's successful again. Like we've been able to really grow with this methodology. I mentioned Gong as well. There are a few other companies that are willing to take the risk. And I think, especially as a startup, like one of my advice to marketers out there is the main advice is like, you are not Steve Jobs. Like if you are working for Apple, maybe every piece of content, you have like a thousand people review it. You want to make sure you're not screwing anything over. But when you're a startup, you have to understand that 99% of marketing is absolutely no noise. If you do like a bad campaign or a bad ad or something that doesn't stick, it's fine. No one cares. No one like it's not like Apple, like they announced a new iPhone, people are gonna stand in line regardless of what that iPhone has in james: Yeah. Aviv Canaani: features. You need to go crazy. Worst case, it doesn't work. No one knows. Like no one would care. No one would write an article about your bad ad or anything like that. But if you experiment and you really push the boundaries of what's possible and you try enough times, like eventually it's going to work. But you have to be bold and take that opportunity. And also, it's important to mention, you need to have a CEO that trusts you. Like after I did the first me when I joined the company after a few weeks. The CEO came to me and said, like, we had a board meeting and one of the investors was asking, like, why are you doing all these silly memes? Like, you we're selling to a serious buyer. And I told the CEO, like, I'm following the footsteps of Gong and a few other companies, trust me, it's going to work. The james: Yeah. Aviv Canaani: CEO trusted me. He could have told me to stop immediately and we would never be in where we are now. so my advice also like to marketers out there or CROs out there that want to take risks is like, if you're in a company where the CEO doesn't believe in it, move to another company. james: Love it. Well look, I am so glad that the CEO trusted in you, allowed you to go on this journey, which which brought us together to be able to have this conversation and for you to to share with it because it is no doubt it is a very challenging time to sell technology. but you guys are doing an incredible job at doing it and by the sounds of it, having fun at the at the same time. Aviv Canaani: Awesome. Thank you so much, James. I really enjoyed this.