Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: So Alan, it's great to have you here today. Why don't you we start off by you just telling us who you are and what is it that you do.
[00:00:24] Speaker A: Great. I glad to be here as well. Well, as you said, I'm Alan Gold, I'm a partner with a company, Tech CxO in their growth, revenue growth and strategy practice and I advise founders, CEOs, growth companies either pre funding or series A and B about the best ways to get above the noise, how to break through in a crowded market and how to be creative without losing their hair like I have. And I did that. I did that on top of, well, I lost my hair after 35 years in the tech industry for the most part with companies being bought and sold, raising funds, launching new products, fighting back the competition and trying to find white space to move into.
I'm not sure how I could do it in the AI and Google search world now, but I've got those basics under my belt and now I very happily advise clients about how to avoid pitfalls and how to stand out.
[00:01:17] Speaker B: That's fantastic. Well, that's exactly why, you know, it was wonderful to have you accept our invitation to be on this podcast because this really is about growth. You know, how do we stand out? How do tech companies stand out in today's really noisy market when everyone really is kind of saying the same thing.
So let's talk a little bit about the growth. You know, when most people hear growth, they think tactics. When you first walk into a company, what is the first thing you look to understand to find out why their growth is stagnated or just come to a, just a stuck position?
[00:01:50] Speaker A: Well, what I've discovered is even though everyone thinks that their problems are unique, from where I sit and people like me, the problems aren't. Typically what happens in my experience at least is a founder starts to grow, has a great idea, creates great product or great services, brings it to market, gets some wins. Usually it's friends and family wins or somebody who knows somebody or an investor who's not quite ready to invest but knows his second cousin's brother in law's sister's dog and they bring something in, they get a bunch of beta tests and next thing they know, this is great. And then they go out and they find a way to bring in a sales guy or two and as often as not, that's, you know, on commission only basis, probably with some equity. And the battles begin between, well, I know you know how to sell, but you don't know how to Sell the way I sell. And so they fight back and forth. So they finally fight that battle and then the sales guys go off and they knock on doors and they fail. Not because they're not good, not because the product or service isn't good, but because they have absolutely no air support. Nobody knows who they are, they're trying to get in the door. In an enterprise, even a mid sized company, where the risk is just too high to talk to somebody that they don't know, matter how cool it is, you know, it takes the rare executive to say, sure, I'll give it a shot. What could go wrong? Well, as we know, a lot of things can go wrong. So one of the very first things I do when I come in is look at the structure and look at what their activities have been to date. Usually it has been bringing in very tactical support people to support the sales guy. And if they've brought someone in and made them vice president or Croatia marketing plus sales equals sales. And that's just the nature of the beast. It's the stronger personality, if you will. And so I look to see what they've done and then I start asking a series of questions. I have a very detailed checklist that I go through that are all the kinds of questions that anyone would ask if it occurred to them to ask them, you know, and the founder would certainly be capable of asking themselves, why should I care about the product? What, you know, what is it that makes me different from somebody else? Is this a must have or a nice to have? Is there a compelling event that I can use to raise visibility and to raise a sense of urgency? And also, am I creating a new category or am I doing something new and different in an existing category? And sometimes that process alone raises enough information to say, all right, let's dig out a strategy and let's take a look at where others aren't or where you have strengths. You know, everyone knows about SWOT analysis and you know, AI certainly helps in looking at the landscape and sifting through analyst reports and, you know, all of the stuff that clogs up the Internet these days. But the notion then is to figure out how to find a unique value proposition. And that doesn't have to be a big magical thing, it just has to be a story that you can tell that makes you stand out. Then once you have the strategy, I'm going after these industries, I'm going after these geographies, I'm going after these size companies, I'm going after this product set of problems, then you Start the tactical programs to best support that. Usually it's the other way around. You know, use the phrase ready, fire, aim, if you don't mind that. And that's how most of these things go. And it tends to be sales driven, which means it's not very structured. And the founder is a founder because he has the strength of conviction and enough ego to say, I can do this and nobody else can. And so we're going to have someone
[00:05:23] Speaker B: come in a little bit later on because we, you know, it doesn't really, we see this all the time. It doesn't want, whether you're a million 5, 50. We've even seen founder led sales even up to 25, 30 million. But what we're always hearing is a founder saying we need more leads, we need more leads. And they don't know what they don't know. So when a founder says we need more leads, what in your opinion is the common underlying problems that are often hiding underneath that sentence?
[00:05:48] Speaker A: Well, there are probably three that come to mind in no particular order. Visibility to the pipeline from the founder's perspective. And that belies an infrastructure that actually manages leads that come in. And whether that's as sophisticated as grading or lead scoring or just simply tracking and you know, tracking and recording, it doesn't matter. Visibility is one. The second is, second problem is where are you trying to get your leads from? And if you're not bringing any leads in, chances are you're not telling a story, you don't know where you're fishing. Teaching people to fish is a lot of what I do from a, at least a metaphorical perspective. And the third piece is, do you know what a lead is? Do you understand what a lead is? Is that someone who just simply came to your website, somebody downloaded a document, he gave you a business card at a conference, right? Whether that's an IBM conference or a Gartner conference. You know, the fishbowl with the business cards is still a thing, digital or not. Or the guys with the scanners that, you know, pull the badge, you know, the sales guy go look at all the leads. But they could be everyone. We could be back to my cousin's, you know, my cousin's pet duck might be there too. You know, you just don't know. And those are, those are, I think the really big problems is lack of focus, lack of infrastructure and visibility.
[00:07:07] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a really good point, isn't it? That the fact is that a lot of companies believe just because they have a certain branding out there that they've got the visibility, but they might have the visibility, but they don't have any positioning within the marketplace.
[00:07:19] Speaker A: Right.
[00:07:20] Speaker B: So in your opinion, Anna, what does strong positioning sound like, in let's say in plain English, that tech founders, tech leaders today that are watching or listening to this can quickly tell if their positioning is weak or their positioning is strong?
[00:07:33] Speaker A: Well, it's sort of the inverse of what I've said. If you're, if your positioning is strong and your messaging is strong, the people who are going to come to your site will fit your icp, your, your ideal client profile, customer profile. If you don't have an icp, well, that's problem one. But let's assume you do.
And so it becomes a match game, you know, and whether that's five leads that come in in a month or 500 that come in in a week, if they match that icp, then chances are your branding and your positioning are good. Now it becomes a tactical issue of taking people through the buying journey, understanding what that journey is, nurturing them, and then ultimately gets down to how good you can close. And so if you're not seeing that, if they're coming in from all corners of the world, I mean, let's say, simplest example is geographic. If you're focused on North America or even if you're just focused, let's say you're a regional services company.
My apologies. Even if you're a regional services company and you want to focus in the Northeast, if you're getting leads from California, unless that's part of your strategic plan to grow into California, that's not a lead, that's just simply noise. And if it's off of a PPC campaign, a pay per click campaign, you just wasted that money. You are a North American company and your leads are coming in from the Philippines, from Southeast Asia, from Australia, you're wasting your money. So it always comes down to a mismatch. And that's the easiest, you know, back of envelope way to compare.
[00:09:05] Speaker B: Exactly. Right. I think you've got to understand exactly where is good money spent and where is good money lost. And there tends to be a lot of marketing money just thrown away. And people say, well, that didn't work and this didn't work and actually just needs more guide rails, more guardrails in place to say this is, this is where we're going to spend our money from. Let's go back to obviously, like you said, like you mentioned, marketing plus sales get sales, Marketing plus sales gets the revenue. You said that earlier on. There's still a lot of founders who are still, you know, founder led sales. They're still the main closer because they don't believe anyone closer as well as they could and rightly so because they have more passion than anybody else.
Where do you see most founders and leaders get stuck, you know, and just say look. You will walk into them and say look, now it's time to get, you know, a CRO or get a sales director in there.
Where do you see that the most within founders and what can they do about that?
[00:09:55] Speaker A: Well, the most common circumstance is pure and simple, they don't scale.
So the through whatever means a lot of leads are coming in, whether that's through an investor, whether that's coming in through, you know, effective marketing, whether that's coming in from account based sales that the sales team may be doing or the business development people may be doing. If you've got 10 of them queued up, the founder can't possibly run a company, help the dev team lay out his vision, make sure that his vision is being adhered to and running a sales cycle. The second part is I have never met a founder with enough patience to prosecute a sales cycle, especially in a meaningful technology sale. Because this is not downloading, you know, a disk cleaning app or something that is, you know, a weather widget. This is something that chances are is going to have an impact on the business activities of your customer. And so there has to be certain things that are in safeguard, you know, that are safeguarding all of this. Some of it may be compliance, some of it may be security.
I see a lot of failings from pilot programs and not being able to be rolled out because they don't meet the security requirements of the, you know, of the, of the company. And that's why most large companies, certainly the ones I've worked with and that, and they've been as big as Johnson and Johnson and Merck, you know, that's why they're two, three, sometimes four revs back in versions of software because they wait for things to be bulletproof. NASA does the same thing. There's a reason why the space shuttle was using 70s Apple II technology. It's because it's the only thing that had been tested long enough to show that it was bulletproof. And that's tough for a founder to manage because if he's then selling with passion. I am so sorry, I thought I turned that off. And I'm not even a founder and I've got incoming. And so the challenge I think here is to get them to sit down and think about ways that they can maximize their time. I mean, you only have seven days a week, 24 hours in a day. And even if you're one of those people that only sleeps three hours a night and only eats one meal a day, that's still downtime. You still have to work within, you know, regular business hours. If you're going to do sales cycles, that means you're doing all your other work overnight. And that's not very efficient. So what I have seen work the best is getting a sales partner to come in. Sometimes it's a third party first because then there's a little bit more flexibility. A company that has methodology that they have used and demonstrates it, and then it becomes a shared risk. I'm going to bring you in prospects to your ICP and you can help to close them. We're going to sit side by side with you, we'll train your sales reps, we'll do it ourselves, whatever the mechanism is. And once they see success coming in, most founders will relax a little bit, right, because they've got investors breathing down their neck on one side, they've got ego and pride, understandably, on the other side. And then they've got, all of a sudden they've got these people that they have to take care of. And if the company fails, you know, whether that's two people or 200 people, you know, they feel a responsibility for that. So it becomes a little bit. I'm from New England, so we talk about the best way to cook a lobster. And there's one school, there's one school that says you drop them in a pot of boiling water, ignore the streams and you know, have a nice meal when it's cooked. There are others that say, put them in the water, cover the lid tightly so they don't jump out, then turn the heat on and they kind of quietly settle down and go to sleep. And then you eat them.
[00:13:38] Speaker B: And there's so much information out there, isn't there? There's, there's so many points of view and I think, yeah, the reason why people listen to this particular podcast or watch podcasts is so that they've been bombarded with information all the time. That's why they just come in here, get bite sized chunks from leaders like you, etc. But it's all back down to the hardest conversations. You know, as consultants and as mentors to companies, we always have to have these hard conversations with leaders and founders. What is the hardest conversation you've had to have with a leader or leadership teams that they, they tend to avoid and hide on a bushel, but actually, once they actually do something about it, it actually unlocks growth that they never thought was possible.
[00:14:17] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. And, and by the way, just as a quick aside, that's one of the real values of little pitch for my industry. That's why I'm a professional fractional exec, and that's why you see so many fractional people out there. Not the ones that are between jobs, but people who do this for a living. Because you're not dealing with politics, you're not dealing with sucking up, you're not dealing with the administrative as administrivia that takes up your time. And so the hard conversations are easier to have in that case. And usually it comes down to a terrible way to say this, but your baby's ugly, and no one wants to hear that. But the trick then is to say, this is how we're going to make the baby look better, and this is what needs to be done. And that's the really hard conversation. Because you're not, you're not going to be passionate, you're not going to invent something that says, well, this kind of is average, isn't it? You know, everyone thinks they've got the best thing that has ever been designed, and you have to be diplomatic about it. I would never say that quite, as, quite the way I said this flippantly on this podcast. But you have to have the conversation and say, right now, you're ordinary. Let's do these five things and make you not ordinary. And, you know, have you stand up. And I would say, you know, eight out of ten times I managed to get them there. The other two times, you know, you can't hit, you can't help everybody. And sometimes, you know, I've done this before, I know what's right. I mean, there are some people who are like that and, you know, go in good health and do your thing, but most of the time, all you have to do is validate your position and be able to defend it. Otherwise you don't have a right to call them on it anyway.
[00:15:53] Speaker B: Absolutely right. And I think you and I, we've spoken about this before, is that if everyone calls themselves an expert, no one really is an expert in the eyes of the ICP that's out there, because it's just noise. And if it's just noise and you're not standing out and you're not, and you think you honestly do have the best looking baby. Well, eight other people have knocked on the same door. Eight other people have done the same email campaign. Eight other people have done the Same LinkedIn connection. They've all done the same things. You're doing say, my baby's the best. And you've literally got to say, right, you may be the best, but it's not standing out. What can we actually do now to make it stand out and have those hard conversations? So thank you for the candle on that one, Alan. You know, because this is something we talk about quite a lot, we can't really have a tech episode, a tech podcast episode, touching on AI. AI is everywhere right now. What, in your view and your experience and insights there, where. What are smart leaders doing in, in your eyes, when it comes to AI, briefly?
[00:16:54] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a, that's a really good question. And it's about as topical as it gets. And I write on that quite a, quite a bit on LinkedIn for just that reason.
Here's my take. First of all, AI is a great gopher, It's a great admin assistant, it's a great research analyst.
You have to validate and make sure they're not making stuff up, as we read in the paper, with some frequency, especially with studies and law briefs. But it's a really good tool. I mean, I'm going to harken back to the olden days before you and I were around with calculators. Everyone was up in arms when the first portable calculator came out. It was going to make students stupid. They weren't going to be able to learn math. And it turned out that wasn't the case. It meant that they weren't going to get buried in arithmetic and they could think through the word problem or they could think through the issue. AI is the same thing. AI saves me, saves a founder, saves a marketing team. Hours and hours and hours of digging through the muck to get to the good stuff. But like anything else, whether that's driving a car or an airplane, if I play look, if I played Microsoft flight simulator for 20 years, I'm still not qualified to fly a 7 3, you know, commercially or otherwise. I'm still going to crash if I even get it off the ground, you know, and using AI is really that complicated. And, you know, anyone can find prompts. Everyone generates prompts. LinkedIn is filled with it. The Internet is, you know, here's the cheat sheet for prompting and so forth. But it takes someone with the expertise in the topic at hand, whether that's Creating a go to market strategy, whether that's doing a market analysis, whether that's analyzing the commonalities between your customers and your competitors customers, you know, whatever that analysis is, you have to have an expert who understands what they're looking at to be able to guide that AI maybe down the line, you know, I mean, all the jokes about AI taking over for us, you know, all of our note takers show up on Zoom meetings, sometimes more than we are. So maybe the note takers can just have meetings and we can go be productive. But until that happens, we have to sit down and we have to be the pilots. So it's not about, well, I read this or I did an AI search and a lot of founders will do that because it's something they can do with their hands, right? It's, you know, and what's a characteristic of founders? They're always moving, they're always, always doing something. And even in growth companies, it's very hands on, it's very tactical and tactile as well, where they've got their fingers in everything to make sure that it's up to snuff. Now if you're the maitre d in a fine restaurant, that's one thing, right? You keep your Michelin stars. But if you're a founder in the tech industry in particular, there's expertise that you just don't have. And so making sure that you're letting experts be experts and proving what they do is really important. And you know, that's to me the best way to apply AI. Ask yourself, does this make my company better or does this make my product better or is it just cool? And if the answer is it's just cool, don't do it. Because it's going to be a cul de sac and a distraction from getting to the right customers with the right things to solve a problem.
[00:20:07] Speaker B: Well, that is a fantastic, fantastic phrase to finish off this interview. If it's cool, don't do it. Stop following the shiny object. Make sure you write the ask, you ask the right questions for it. So Alan, if people want to get hold of you potentially asking questions, potentially, what's the best way of doing that?
[00:20:24] Speaker A: Easiest way is to either ping me on LinkedIn, easy to find, or my email. It's Alan A L A N Gold, G o l d ech cxo.com and happy to chat with anyone. Fantastic.
[00:20:38] Speaker B: Well, thank you, Alan. It's been an actual pleasure having you on today. Thank you for your time and your insights. I'm sure the listeners and the viewers are going to get a lot out of it today.
[00:20:47] Speaker A: Thank you very much as well. It was a real pleasure to be here.
[00:20:49] Speaker B: Thank you,
[00:20:54] Speaker A: Sam.
