Podcasts about CRO

SEO Fundamentals: How to Crawl, Render, Index, Rank, and Click Internet Webpages with SEO Expert, Favour Obasi-Ike | Get exclusive SEO newsletters in your inbox.We discuss Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and its impact on online business growth, in this episode. We emphasize the importance of strategic content creation and website optimization for ranking highly on search engines like Google. The conversation also touches upon related topics such as website development, conversion rate optimization (CRO), and the patience required for SEO results, contrasting it with immediate, paid advertising. Favour illustrates SEO success with personal examples of articles that ranked quickly, highlighting the "crawl, render, index, rank, and click" process crucial for online visibility and customer acquisition.How do website development and SEO work together to improve online visibility?Favour: Effective website development is foundational for SEO. Websites need to be readable, well-organized, and user-friendly to ensure a positive visitor experience. SEO, on the other hand, is a broad area encompassing both on-page (e.g., meta titles, meta descriptions, alt tags) and off-page efforts (e.g., backlinks). The goal is to optimize the site so it ranks highly on search engines like Google, ideally within the top 5-10 results, to increase visibility and attract more clicks. While a well-built website provides the structure, SEO ensures it's found by the right audience.What is the typical timeframe for seeing SEO results, and why is patience crucial?Favour: Unlike paid advertisements that can yield immediate attention, SEO takes time to show significant results, typically between 3 to 6 months. This delay is due to the saturation of online content and the complex processes search engines use to crawl, render, index, and rank websites. Many clients seek "quick fixes," often resorting to ads, but sustained SEO efforts require patience and consistent work to build domain authority and organic presence over time.How does Favour differentiate between "paying for attention" (ads) and "catching attention" (SEO)?Favour: There's a critical distinction between paying for attention through ads and genuinely catching attention through organic strategies like SEO. Ads offer "impressions" and "reach," but don't guarantee engagement or conversion. Catching attention implies deeper engagement, leading to clicks and ultimately, the ideal client who is genuinely interested in the business's offerings. SEO focuses on attracting an "ideal client avatar" by understanding their psychographic, sociographic, and demographic inputs, leading to more qualified leads.What are the five crucial steps in the SEO process outlined by Favour?Favour: The SEO process consists of five interconnected steps:Crawl: The initial discovery phase where search engines cautiously navigate and explore new or updated web content. It's like a website's "baby" phase.Render: The time it takes for search engines to process and understand the content and structure of a website. This is the "loading time" before indexing.Index: The process where search engines create an inventory or directory of your website's content. This involves creating a sitemap and using relevant keywords to categorize your content for search.Rank: Once indexed, a website is positioned in search results based on various algorithm standards. Higher rankings mean greater visibility.Click: The ultimate goal, where users find and click on your content because it's relevant and compelling, leading to conversions or engagement.Why is "domain authority" important in SEO, and how is it built?Favour: Domain authority is a crucial factor in SEO, calculating and averaging a website's "domain presence." This means consistently showing up where people look for information and providing consistent, valuable content without fail. A strong domain authority allows websites to rank faster, even for new articles. It's built through sustained content creation, strategic SEO implementation, and establishing a credible online presence over time.What is the significance of local SEO compared to national or global SEO?Favour: Local SEO often yields faster results than national or global SEO because the competition is significantly lower. For businesses with a local focus or a niche audience, optimizing for local search terms allows them to convert leads more quickly. While larger organizations might have greater resources, small, nimble local businesses can see a higher return on investment (ROI) from their SEO efforts due to the focused nature of their target audience.How can business owners effectively test their SEO strategies despite the long-term nature of results?Favour: While it can take months for SEO results to fully manifest, testing is still vital. Businesses are already "testing" by consistently creating content for social media and other platforms. For SEO specifically, testing involves applying concepts (like optimizing a website for clicks rather than just impressions), analyzing what gets indexed, and identifying what people are searching for. The goal is to get faster results through strategic implementation and to view SEO as an investment rather than an expense, understanding that sustained effort can lead to long-term organic presence and reduced reliance on paid advertising.Digital Marketing SEO Resources:>> ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Join our exclusive SEO Marketing community⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠>> ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠SEO Optimization Blogs⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠>> ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Book Complimentary SEO Discovery Call⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠>> ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to We Don't PLAY Podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Brands We Love and Support⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Loving Me Beauty | Buy Vegan-based Luxury Products⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Unlock your future in real estate—get certified in Ghana today!⁠See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this episode of Molecule to Market, you'll go inside the outsourcing space of the global drug development sector with Claire Riches, Vice President, Clinical Solutions at Citeline. Your host, Raman Sehgal, discusses the pharmaceutical and biotechnology supply chain with Claire, covering: Being involved in the clinical development and commercial launch of a little mega-blockbuster, called... Viagra. Her first exposure to outsourcing at a small biotech, and the importance of partnerships in progressing the pipeline. Ignoring the pharma industry snobbery, and opting to move into the fast and varied world of CROs. Timeless sponsor and provider partnership tips, including the importance of aligned intentions, especially with biotechs. How are the tailwinds for rare diseases, meeting unmet patient needs, AI/data, and personalised medicines driving demand at Citeline? With over 30 years' experience in the life science sector, Claire is a passionate advocate of bringing drug development to life. Having worked in large pharma, biotech and the CRO space, Claire uses her platform to raise awareness of the challenges the industry is facing, and how as a collective voice, we can solve big, challenging questions. She believes strongly in the need to ask questions of the industry to drive change, which in turn drives innovation and growth. Claire speaks regularly through various forums on the topics of Women in Science, Impacts of Politics and Economics on Drug Development and Drug Access, and Evolution and Efficiency of Drug Development pathways. She is currently focused on levelling the playing field for the Biotech industry via her podcast Small Biotech, Big Decisions | Citeline   Please subscribe, tell your industry colleagues and join us in celebrating and promoting the value and importance of the global life science outsourcing space. We'd also appreciate a positive rating!

Josh Payne is the Founder and CEO of Coframe, an AI‑powered platform that optimizes website copy, UI, and conversion performance through machine learning. A serial entrepreneur, he previously co‑founded Autograph, a fan‑experience unicorn backed by a16z and Kleiner Perkins, and AccessBell, a video‑conferencing startup acquired by Tata Group. A Stanford graduate with BS, MS, and MBA degrees, Josh has authored over 20 papers and patents in AI and frequently guest lectures on generative AI. He is passionate about advancing AI‑driven tools that help businesses scale through personalization and intelligent automation. In this episode… Many companies struggle to turn website visitors into paying customers. Conversion rate optimization often feels slow, costly, and dependent on endless iterations, leaving teams unsure how to test the right elements efficiently. How can businesses rapidly identify what truly drives user engagement and lift conversions without exhausting their resources? Josh Payne, an AI innovator and serial entrepreneur with experience building self-improving digital systems, shares how his AI-powered approach solves this challenge by automating and accelerating conversion rate optimization. Drawing on lessons from CRO expert Justin Christianson, Josh explains the importance of systematically testing site elements, understanding visitor intent, and leveraging data-driven iteration. He also details how companies can scale experiments, reduce engineering and design burden, and uncover winning website variations faster to drive significant revenue growth. In this episode of the Inspired Insider podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Josh Payne, Founder and CEO of Coframe, about using AI to transform website conversion optimization. Josh discusses the power of iterative testing, lessons from raising capital for multiple startups, and the role of hackathons in building high-performing teams. He also shares insights on partnering with major brands, scaling experiments efficiently, and leveraging AI for competitive advantage.

In 2025's hyper-competitive staffing landscape, staffing firm branding is no longer optional—it's the deciding factor between being ignored and being the go-to choice for clients and candidates. In this in-depth conversation, Brad Bialy and Becca Searns from Haley Marketing reveal how staffing companies can differentiate themselves in a commoditized market by building a brand that is authentic, consistent, and memorable across every touchpoint.   If your staffing firm still thinks “brand” means a logo and some colors, this episode will change your perspective.   Expect to Learn: 1. Why branding in staffing is more important now than ever before 2. How to move beyond visual identity into voice, tone, and value proposition 3. What the best staffing firms do differently to create trust and loyalty 4. How to integrate brand into every medium—from your website to sales collateral 5. The role AI can play in personalization, content creation, and CRO (without losing your brand voice) 6. Proven website strategies that improve conversions while reinforcing your brand identity   This episode should inspire you to explore staffing marketing strategies and recruiting firm differentiation so you can rise above generic, AI-generated content and stand out from competitors. You'll also hear why companies like top-ranking Haley Marketing clients consistently show up on page 1 for staffing firm branding searches—and how you can adopt similar strategies. 

Is your sales team underperforming? Before blaming the team, it might be time to consider the bigger picture. Learn how building trust and aligning marketing with sales can produce significant results.   In this episode of Sharkpreneur, Seth Greene speaks with Geoff Ketterer, an 8-Figure Sales Trainer & CRO. He shares his journey from being a chef to building a successful sales consulting business. After helping over 150 businesses grow, Geoff explains how to transform sales teams, the importance of internal culture, and how to use a hybrid social engine to attract better leads. His approach moves away from traditional sales tactics, focusing instead on building a sustainable and motivated team. Geoff's insights are valuable for CEOs looking to improve their sales teams and scale without burning out.   Key Takeaways: → The most prominent misconceptions CEOs have about sales team struggles. → Why culture is the key to a high-performing sales team. → How skepticism in the market is affecting sales conversions. → How to align sales and marketing teams to achieve better results. → Strategies for scaling businesses without overloading the sales team.   Geoff Ketterer is the guy CEOs call when their sales teams are underperforming and they're tired of wasting money on disconnected strategies that don't work. With years of experience working alongside top-tier companies like 7th Level and Closers.io, Geoff knows how to fix broken teams and transform them into high-performing sales powerhouses. As a fractional CRO, he has helped over 150 businesses scale with his no-nonsense approach to aligning sales and marketing into one unstoppable revenue machine. He scaled Functional Medicine Academy from $7K/month to SIM/month in just 9 months, and he's done it for countless others since.   Connect With Geoff: Website Instagram TikTok LinkedIn   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

#541 Want to make your website your best salesperson? In this episode, host Brien Gearin dives into the fascinating world of conversion rate optimization (CRO) with Sahil Patel, CEO of Spiralize. Together, they explore how your website can and should be converting more of the traffic you already receive. Sahil shares his journey from being a Spiralize customer to leading the company, along with actionable insights into A/B testing, website optimization, and building a data-driven approach to increase conversions. Discover the power of proven A/B test winners, the importance of running iterative experiments, and why CRO is positioned to be as critical for businesses today as SEO was 20 years ago. Whether you're a B2B SaaS company or a small business owner looking to optimize your website, this episode is packed with value! (Original Air Date - 12/16/24) What we discuss with Sahil: + Website as a salesperson: Your website should convert visitors + CRO defined: Turning visitors into customers through testing + A/B testing power: Measure and refine website performance + Data-driven strategies: Use proven A/B test winners + Website optimization tips: Try Loom videos and Google Translate + Focus on B2B SaaS: Optimize trial and demo buttons + CRO beyond SaaS: Applicable to industries like home services + Avoid pitfalls: Don't skip testing or rely on guesses + Future of CRO: Positioned for growth, like early SEO + Spiralize's model: Full-service, data-powered optimization Thank you, Sahil! Check out Spiralyze at ⁠Spiralyze.com⁠. Follow Sahil on ⁠LinkedIn⁠. Watch the ⁠video podcast⁠ of this episode! To get access to our FREE Business Training course go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠MillionaireUniversity.com/training⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. And follow us on: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Tik Tok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Youtube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ To get exclusive offers mentioned in this episode and to support the show, visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠millionaireuniversity.com/sponsors⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Want to hear from more incredible entrepreneurs? Check out all of our interviews ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this eye-opening conversation, Brendon Dennewill sits down with Kristen McGarr, Founder and Fractional CRO from Adroit Insights, to discuss why most CRM implementations fail and what businesses can do differently. They dive deep into the critical importance of prioritizing people and processes before technology, sharing real-world examples of how this approach transformed a 6-person company into a 21-person team in just six months.Kristen brings her unique perspective as both a CRO and CRM expert, explaining why adoption is the #1 metric for CRM success and how to think about your CRM as a valued team member rather than just another software expense. This episode is perfect for business leaders considering a CRM implementation, struggling with current adoption issues, or planning for growth.What You'll Learn:Why the "people, process, technology" framework is critical for CRM successThe real reasons CRM implementations fail (and how to avoid them)How to calculate the true cost of CRM ownership beyond software subscriptionsStrategies for maintaining data integrity as your business growsThe importance of having an internal CRM championResources Mentioned:HubSpot: Comprehensive CRM and marketing platformZoho: Business software suite and CRM platformUpwork: Platform for finding CRM support resourcesIDC Research: Total value of ecosystem studiesGoogle Sheets integrations: For bridging spreadsheet users to CRM adoptionAbout Kristen McGarrTitle: Founder & Fractional Chief Revenue OfficerCompany: Adroit InsightsExpertise: CRM implementation, revenue operations, business process optimization, and fractional leadership for solopreneurs and small businessesLinkedIn: Kristen McGarr Website: Adroit InsightsLet's Connect Subscribe to the RevOps Champions Newsletter LinkedIn YouTube Explore the show at revopschampions.com. Ready to unite your teams with RevOps strategies that eliminate costly silos and drive growth? Let's talk!

In this episode of the East Coast Elite series, we sit down with Austin Stefani, CRO at DBT Labs, to discuss his career journey from EMC to his current role.   austin shares his fundamental principles for sales leadership, emphasizing the importance of making every individual on the team successful.   We learn about his focus on skill acquisition, the value of learning from challenges, and why empathy is crucial for both employees and customers. Austin breaks down his "playbook" for problem identification and how to apply it at various stages of a company's growth, from building a sales process and managing pipeline to scaling international teams.  

Send us a textCRO veteran Dylan Ander (Founder, heatmap.com) joins Jordan to spill the never-before-shared story of how he landed heatmap.com by acquiring an entire C-Corp—and why the name matters for brand authority, SEO, and inbound. We break down why GA4 falls short for eCommerce, how definitions (sessions, idle windows, engagement) skew your numbers vs Shopify, and what to use when you need buyer-truth, not vanity metrics.Dylan unveils element-level revenue analytics—Revenue per Click (RPC) and Revenue per Session (RPS)—plus the coming Revenue per View (RPV), so you can prioritize changes that actually increase cash, not just clicks. We dig into pixel-level behavior tracking (no cookies, no PII), AI insights that call out underperforming elements (e.g., a specific FAQ item), and how to catch bugs and bot traffic before they burn revenue.We also get tactical on replacing Google Optimize, the realities of SaaS pricing (and why “McDonald's pricing” works), and the rise of social search (TikTok as a top search engine) shaping product discovery more than LLM/Chat. If you own a P&L for a DTC brand—or you're the CRO/performance lead—this episode will make you money.What you'll learn→ How Dylan cold-outreaches to acquire companies & premium domains (the “urgent, must speak to founder” play)→ Why GA4 under-/over-reports vs Shopify—and how definitions (idle windows, engagement) distort truth→ The RPC/RPS (and coming RPV) metrics that finally connect elements → revenue→ Pixel-level behavior tracking (no cookies/PII) + AI insights that tell you exactly what to change→ Social search optimization (TikTok search often beats LLM/Chat for product discovery)→ Replacing Google Optimize and building reliable A/B workflows in 2025→ The real cost drivers behind SaaS pricing—and how to price without burning trust→ Bot/junk filtering and defining a “session” that reflects buyers, not noiseWho this is for→ DTC/eCommerce founders & growth leaders→ CROs, performance marketers, and Shopify teams→ SaaS operators curious about pricing, PLG, and analytics positioningTimestamp:00:00 Intro & why this convo matters for DTC02:00 The C-Corp acquisition story behind heatmap.com06:30 Exact-match domains, SEO, and the inbound engine09:20 GA4 vs Shopify: definitions that change your numbers16:30 RIP Google Optimize: reliable A/B testing in 202518:50 Element-level revenue: RPC, RPS (and RPV coming)22:30 Pixel-level tracking & AI insights (no cookies/PII)26:15 Catching bugs + filtering bots/junk traffic28:40 Social search: TikTok as a top product discovery engine31:20 SaaS pricing & the “McDonald's” strategy36:40 Who should use revenue-based heatmaps (and why)44:30 Contrarian analytics takes you need to hear55:10 Personal: life, music, and loving the gameGuestDylan Ander — Founder, heatmap.com (revenue-based heatmaps, funnels, analytics for ecom). Mentions his upcoming book, Billion Dollar Websites.

Visit thedigitalslicepodcast.com for complete show notes of every podcast episode. Join Brad Friedman and Andy Culligan as they chat about getting your sales and marketing teams to work together and the hidden costs of siloed teams. Andy Culligan is a marketing leader specializing in revenue growth and scaling SaaS businesses. With close to a decade of experience in both marketing and sales, Andy excels as a Fractional CMO, CRO, and Marketing Advisor. He is known for his straightforward approach to Account-Based Marketing (ABM), aligning marketing and sales teams to drive commercial success. Andy has held key marketing leadership positions at multiple SaaS companies including Emarsys (acquired by SAP), Exponea (acquired by Bloomreach) & Leadfeeder (now Echobot). He focuses on personalized marketing strategies that create meaningful touchpoints, ultimately boosting revenue for his clients. The Digital Slice Podcast is brought to you by Magai. Up your AI game at https://friedmansocialmedia.com/magai

AI isn't just hype, it's already changing how service companies capture leads, close deals, and keep customers happy. In this episode, Chris and Brandon dive into the most practical, boots-on-the-ground conversation we've ever had about AI for the trades. Our guest, Nick D'Urbano, CRO and co-founder of Distance, brings a wild career path, from Deloitte M&A to running growth for Victoria's Secret overseas, to his mission of helping restoration, plumbing, and HVAC companies stop letting revenue slip through the cracks Why you should listen: [00:03:37] Nick's career path and how e-commerce growth strategies translate perfectly into service industries. [00:10:19] Why your call intake process is probably leaking revenue—and how to fix it before spending more on marketing. [00:16:30] The cost of missed calls, after-hours gaps, and the “storm surge” scenario where AI can save six-figure jobs. [00:23:35] Offensive vs. defensive AI strategies—when to focus on lead capture vs. protecting the leads you've already paid for. [00:33:37] How far AI voice has come—and why it's no longer the clunky, robotic call bot you're picturing. [00:44:21] Using AI across different channels (voice, SMS, chat) to meet customers where they're at—in real time. [00:50:51] The opportunity to use AI for proactive customer check-ins to prevent small frustrations from turning into slow-pay invoices. [01:01:47] The three main ways Distance helps companies capture more leads and book more jobs. Did you know... Only 30% of businesses listed for sale actually find a buyer? Even more striking, just 10% of those sell for the price their owners anticipated or higher, meaning only 3% of all business owners achieve their desired sale price. By focusing on understanding and enhancing your enterprise value, you can significantly boost your chances of joining that successful 3%. Business Health & Value Assessment Start Assessment Know Your Enterprise Value. See Your Potential Gaps. Complete this assessment in less than 15 minutes and receive a free assessment for your business that includes: A Lite Valuation Of Your Business Your Value Multiplier Per Your Industry Health Assessment Per Our PYB Methodology Business Value & Growth Roadmap Tailored For You Value Acceleration Strategies Spotlight on Floodlight: Your Secret Weapon for Sales & Scaling This isn't a paid plug. It's real talk from the front lines. If you've ever thought, “How do I get a VP-level sales leader or even a sales team without hiring full-time?” Floodlight has the answer. Fractional Sales Leadership They act as your outsourced VP of Sales, taking full responsibility for training, managing, and growing your sales team. No six-figure hire needed. Clients often close 20 to 50 percent more deals within six months, thanks to data-driven coaching, CRM setup, scripts, and performance reviews.More at floodlightgrp.com/sales Commercial Sales MasterCourse A self-paced, video-driven B2B sales course designed specifically for restoration teams. Perfect for building commercial revenue and getting free from TPA handcuffs. Covers mindset, prospecting, pipeline building, LinkedIn lead generation, and includes a $250 discount with code SALESBOOST.Details at floodlightgrp.com/courses Tailored Consulting & Coaching Floodlight's Propel Your Business methodology offers a full-circle roadmap: financials, sales, marketing, leadership, recruiting, productivity. All built for contractors. These aren't “life coaches.” They're former restoration owners who've lived the chaos and know how to scale out of it.Explore more at floodlightgrp.com Live Training, Tools & Strategic Partnerships Floodlight also delivers live onsite and virtual training, keynote speaking, and leadership tracks covering operations, project management, and strategic growth. Bonus: They've vetted tools like Xcelerate, Liftify, and Sureti. Floodlight clients get access to exclusive discounts on tech that actually moves the needle.See all partnerships at floodlightgrp.com/partners Why it matters for you as a listener You don't need to figure this stuff out alone. If you're serious about sales growth, operational clarity, exit readiness, or leadership development, Floodlight is already helping folks like you scale smarter. And you get it from industry insiders. People who've sat in your chair, survived the fires, and built systems that actually work.

Remote work and AI promised to make us more productive. The data says otherwise.In this episode, we unpack new research showing remote workers put in about two and a half hours less each day than office teams, and studies suggesting AI tools can weaken critical thinking and slow skill growth. We explore what happens when these trends collide, how they impact career development, and why leaders need to address the issue now.Sources:U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2024 study Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task Never miss a new episode, join our newsletter on revenueformula.substack.com(00:00) - Introduction (03:25) - Research: Remote work is not working (09:31) - Parkinson's Law of Productivity (16:50) - Distractions in work environments (17:48) - Remote work and career development (24:01) - AI's impact on developers (28:41) - Study: AI making us dumber? (32:34) - The Future of Cognitive Functions (40:59) - Final thoughts (41:58) - Next week: What have we been working on?

What if your tools shared context like your team does?This week on Grit, Shishir Mehrotra shares how the Coda and Grammarly collaboration unlocks context as a “superpower,” reflects on his early days at Google and YouTube, and hints at a future where tools anticipate intent and amplify how we work.He also shares how this paves the way for agent-based workflows and AI-native communication, beginning with Superhuman's email experience.Guest: Shishir Mehrotra, co-founder of Coda and CEO of GrammarlyConnect with ShishirXLinkedInChapters: 00:00 Trailer01:24 Introduction02:09 Zoo vs safari12:02 A TV ahead of its time21:25 Product decisions31:25 The data behind the algorithm37:26 The AI native productivity suite48:06 Agents are digital humans57:55 Pressure trade-off1:12:50 Insulated from judgment1:25:19 Who Grammarly is hiring1:25:51 What “grit” means to Shishir1:29:30 OutroMentioned in this episode: YouTube, Ray William Johnson, Spotify, Twitch, MTV, Chris Cox, Facebook, TikTok, Google TV, Centrata, Google Chrome, Android, Gmail, Microsoft, Super Bowl, Mosaic, Panasonic, Sony, Susan Wojcicki, Rishi Chandra, Apple TV, Amazon Firestick, Comcast, LoudCloud (Opsware), Quest Communications, AT&T Southwestern Bell, Salar Kamangar, Patrick Pichette, Eric Schmidt, OpenAI ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta Platforms, Sundar Pichai, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Hamilton, Reid Hoffman, Sam Altman, Tesla, Waymo, Airtable, Notion, Max Lytvyn, Alex Shevchenko, Superhuman, Duolingo, Luis von Ahn, Khan Academy, MrBeast, Facebook Messenger, Snap (Snapchat), WhatsApp, Google+, Meta LLaMa, Satya Nadella, Tim Cook, Daniel GrossConnect with JoubinXLinkedInEmail: grit@kleinerperkins.comLearn more about Kleiner Perkins

In this launch episode of Trusted Connections, host Joe Scattareggia, (CRO, Uniti Wholesale), sits down with Kenny Gunderman, President & CEO of Uniti, to explore the strategic logic behind the Uniti–Windstream merger, what it means for the future of nationwide fiber infrastructure, and how the combined power of a vast network and customer-first culture will reshape the industry.  

In this short segment of the Revenue Builders Podcast, hosts John McMahon and John Kaplan delve into the importance of preparation and coaching with Joe Eskenazi, CRO at Kong Inc. They discuss how vital it is for salespeople to be prepared to reduce stress and build trust with clients. Joe shares personal experiences from his early sales career, emphasizing the need for genuine conversations over mechanical responses. He outlines various training exercises and strategies for developing a high-performing sales team, highlighting the fusion of preparation and development in achieving success. Listen for valuable insights on how preparation transforms pressure into confidence and effectiveness in sales.KEY TAKEAWAYS[00:00:26] The Power of Preparation in Sales[00:01:23] Embracing Authenticity Over Mechanics[00:02:17] The Role of Preparedness in Reducing Stress[00:02:57] The Importance of Self-Driven Development[00:04:25] Coaching and Training for Sales Success[00:05:41] The Impact of Exhaustive PreparationQUOTES[00:02:29] "The difference between stress and pressure is preparedness."[00:02:49] "You bring the character, the courage, the art, the curiosity by applying your style to the skills and knowledge."[00:03:40] "You gotta participate in your own rescue. You gotta put in the work."[00:07:20] "There's no such thing really as closing. It's how openers are closers and opening the sales cycle is where all of your ground is laid."Listen to the full conversation through the link below.https://revenue-builders.simplecast.com/episodes/developing-a-performance-mindset-in-b2b-sales-with-joe-eskenaziEnjoying the podcast? Sign up to receive new episodes straight to your inbox:https://hubs.li/Q02R10xN0Check out John McMahon's book here:Amazon Link: https://a.co/d/1K7DDC4Check out Force Management's Ascender platform here: https://my.ascender.co/Ascender/

Send us a textGuest: Courtney Hiller, Founder of All Points Agency -- You wouldn't hire one person to build your product, sell it, and run support. So why are B2B SaaS companies still expecting one marketer to manage a million-dollar media budget?In this episode, Courtney Hiller, founder of All Points Agency, joins host Ken Lempit to break down how to build a modern media engine that actually performs—and why yesterday's paid strategy won't cut it in 2025.Key insights from this episode:Why splitting strategy, creative, and media buying unlocks performanceWhat most in-house teams get wrong about channel mix and audience targetingHow to fix attribution when your sales cycle is 6–12 monthsWhy creative volume—not just creative quality—is the new growth leverHow to use Reddit, Meta, and programmatic without wasting your budgetIf you're a B2B SaaS CMO or CRO managing six-or seven-figure ad spend, this episode will help you rethink your team structure, channel strategy, and ROI expectations.Referenced in the episode:How Brand Building and Performance Marketing Can Work Together - Harvard Business Review---Not Getting Enough Demos? Your messaging could be turning buyers away before you even get a chance to pitch.

Text us your thoughts on the episode or the show!On today's episode, we talk with Kyle Priest (former CMO, CRO, COO, and President at multiple SaaS firms and agencies) and returning guest Eric Hollebone (President & COO at Demand Lab) to discuss what it really takes for marketing to have a voice at the leadership table. Together, they explore how alignment between marketing, sales, and RevOps creates not only better stories but better business results—and how marketers can shift their mindset to lead strategic growth conversations at the board level.Whether you're in marketing ops, RevOps, or a revenue leader looking to elevate your impact, this conversation is packed with insight on how to connect tactical execution with executive influence.Tune in to hear:Marketing's Role in the Boardroom: Why marketing must go beyond tactics and brand to speak the language of revenue, margin, and predictable growth.Revenue-First Mindset: How aligning on goals, terminology, and KPIs across departments builds organizational momentum and earns trust at the top.The Power of Storytelling: Tips for telling clear, concise growth stories that resonate with CFOs, CEOs, and investors—starting with closed-won revenue and working backwards.Quality of Revenue Explained: Understanding why not all revenue is equal and how marketers can influence strategic customer acquisition that builds long-term value.Practical Advice for RevOps & Marketing Ops: From measuring contribution (not just attribution) to carving out time for strategic insights, learn what actions to take today to elevate your role tomorrow.

In this episode of the Turnaround Management Association's (TMA) Chicago/Midwest podcast, Partner at Paladin Management Group Stefan Piotrowski sits down with host Paul Musser to discuss the importance of Chief Restructuring Officers (CROs) in distressed situations. Stefan delves into a CRO's need for effective communication with stakeholders during turnarounds to ensure success. He also compares the unique challenges that often arise in family-owned businesses versus sponsor-backed companies. Then, Stefan and Paul discuss the value of networking and proactive relationship-building through organizations like the TMA. For new professionals entering the restructuring field, Stefan notes that first and foremost, good work is paramount, along with maintaining contact with new connections.

This Podcast is sponsored by Team Simmer.Go to TeamSimmer and use the coupon code DEVIATE for 10% on individual course purchases.The Technical Marketing Handbook provides a comprehensive journey through technical marketing principles.Sign up to the Simmer Newsletter for the latest news in Technical Marketing.Latest content from Juliana & Simo:Subscribe to Juliana's newsletter: https://julianajackson.substack.com/Latest on the SimoAhava.com blog > Common Mistakes When Working With Click Identifiers, guest post by Jude Nwachukwu Onyejekwe : https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/common-mistakes-click-identifiers/Latest from Juliana: https://julianajackson.substack.com/p/eu-ai-act-explainedConnect with Tim CeuppensLinkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timceuppens/Also mentioned in the episode:Apple Paper about LLM reasoning > https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/illusion-of-thinkingOpenAI Status Page (for when the thought leadership runs out) > https://status.openai.comMeasureCamp Brussels – Nov 15 > https://www.measurecamp.org/brussels/ This podcast is brought to you by Juliana Jackson and Simo Ahava.

Are visitors bouncing before they ever become leads? You might be making them work too hard. In this episode of Search Smarts, host Bob Brennan reveals how small tweaks, like skipping the contact form or offering instant estimates, can lead to big jumps in conversions. He breaks down the mindset shift from "what do we want from the user?" to "what does the user want from us?" If you're ready to eliminate friction, boost trust, and turn more traffic into real results, this one's a must-listen. Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe, leave a review, and send us your questions and we might feature them in an upcoming episode! Ask a question Free SEO Audit SEO Resources Hire Us

Tony chats with Daniel Palacios, Co-Founder and CRO at Sytrex, they are an AI native company that has developed two AI Agents assistants for underwriters. They are mainly focused on helping MGA underwriting teams, basically co-pilots for insurance and reinsurance operations. They place underwriters in the center and take away the manual and boring repetitive work.Daniel Palacios: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielpalaciossales/Sytrex: https://www.sytrex.io/Video Version: https://youtu.be/894J0dwi7O8

Accurate expense coding is critical to building a clean SaaS P&L that drives investor confidence, valuation discussions, and clarity in internal metrics. In episode #303, Ben Murray explains exactly where SaaS operators should code executive-level expenses (CMO, CRO, VP of Services, CFO, etc.) and why coding accuracy is a non-negotiable for both SaaS metrics and investor metrics. Ben also highlights the common mistake of letting G&A become a dumping ground, which can distort key financial metrics, including your gross profit margin, OpEx profile, and overall SaaS valuation. What You'll Learn: Where to code executive salaries and expenses in your SaaS P&L Why department-level cost centers (Sales, Marketing, Services, etc.) are crucial for accurate SaaS metrics How misclassifying expenses can hurt your valuation and confuse investors during due diligence The golden rule: G&A should not be a dumping ground Tips on ensuring your bookkeeping process supports clean financial reporting Why It Matters for SaaS Operators & Investors: Accurate SaaS P&L structures are essential for clean reporting to boards and investors. Incorrect coding can skew key investor metrics like gross margin and operating expense ratios. A well-coded SaaS P&L provides the foundation to benchmark your business, manage spend, and maximize company valuation during fundraising or exit processes. Resources Mentioned: How to Properly Structure Your SaaS P&L (Blog Post + Example Template) Quote from Ben:“As a CFO, G&A isn't a catch-all—it should only hold true G&A costs. Every expense needs to follow the people creating it.”

In this episode, we talk about the messy shift from founder-led sales to something more scalable. A lot of teams trip up here. It's not just about hiring the right people, it's about whether the company is actually ready for them.Early sales hires often fail because the structure, process, or timing is off. The conversation introduces the idea of level awareness, a way to figure out if your setup matches the stage you're in. The same problems tend to repeat, whether you're at $1M or $50M ARR.(00:00) - Introduction (02:12) - Challenges in Founder-Led Sales (05:36) - Diagnosing Founder-Led Sales Issues (08:36) - Hiring Challenges and Misconceptions (11:12) - Framework for Scaling Sales Teams (13:39) - Levels of Sales Maturity (19:20) - Defining Level One (23:27) - Hiring for Stage Level Fit (25:25) - Common Founder Regrets (27:13) - Hiring Sales Leaders with Level Awareness (34:53) - Challenges of Premature Scaling (36:31) - Conclusion (37:37) - Next Week: Is Remote Work & AI Making Us Less Productive?

What happens when a top-performing rep becomes a people-first leader in one of the most demanding roles in tech? In this episode of Coach2Scale, Jeff Perry, CRO at Carta, shares his leadership journey from his early days at Oracle to building high-performing, diverse teams at Carta. He unpacks the misconceptions that still hold sales leaders back, like the idea that only hard-charging, deal-focused managers succeed, or that considerable company experience doesn't translate to startup growth. Jeff challenges these myths with candor, offering lessons for anyone navigating their evolution as a leader.The conversation tackles why being a “nice leader” isn't a liability, how to hire from non-obvious backgrounds, and why no one should ever lose a deal alone. Matt and Jeff also dig into the most challenging job in sales, the frontline manager, and why equipping them with the right mindset and tools is the only way to scale performance sustainably. Whether you're a rep, manager, or CRO, this episode will help you rethink how leadership, culture, and coaching intersect to drive lasting results.Key Takeaways1. Lean into who you are as a leaderStop trying to fit someone else's mold, own your style, values, and story to build authentic credibility.2. Prominent company leaders can thrive in startups.Success in enterprise sales doesn't disqualify you from excelling in high-growth, early-stage environments if you can translate your experience.3. Empathy and accountability are not mutually exclusiveBeing a “nice” leader doesn't mean being soft; it means building trust so you can challenge and develop your people effectively.4. Hiring for diversity improves team performance.Creating teams with varied backgrounds and experiences, not just résumés, leads to more resilience, learning, and results.5. Balanced team performance is more sustainable than star-centric modelsHitting 115% with everyone contributing beats 130% with a few carrying the load, especially when building culture and scale.7. Managers should never lose a deal alone.The best AEs use the entire team, from executives to product, to win; lone-wolf selling is inefficient and risky.8. Coaching should focus beyond the deal.Too many 1:1s revolve around the pipeline; great leaders use coaching to build reps' long-term skills and confidence.9. Sales leadership is about consistency through volatilityIn unpredictable markets, reps need leaders who are steady, transparent, and focused on what can be controlled.10. High growth creates opportunity, but only for those who embrace itCarta's rapid evolution has opened new career paths, but leaders must stay close to the people and remain hands-on to unlock them.11. Frontline managers need structure and support to succeedThe FLM role is the most overloaded in the org; without tools, coaching frameworks, and clarity, they default to dealing with triage and burnout.

Trade shows and events are back!But most still miss the point. If you're not walking away with real relationships and revenue potential, you're doing it wrong.Hey there, I'm Kerry Curran—B2B Revenue Growth Executive Advisor, Industry Analyst, and host of Revenue Boost: A Marketing Podcast.In this episode, Pipeline in Person: How Relationship-First Events Drive Real ROI, we're diving into how the smartest B2B brands are getting off the expo floor and into curated conversations that actually convert.I'm joined by Jon Whitfield, Chief Operating Officer at MediaPost, who has spent over 20 years perfecting the art of high-impact, face-to-face marketing. Jon isn't just running another event company—he's building a reputation for delivering summit experiences that sponsors rebook year after year because they drive pipeline, not just visibility.And here's the surprising truth: smaller, niche gatherings with the right ratio of buyers to sponsors consistently outperform massive trade shows—if you get the format right. Jon breaks down why most conferences fail to deliver ROI—and how to fix it.We cover:The one customer value metric sponsors should use to justify their spend How curated experiences like golf, axe throwing, and roundtables deepen buyer trust What brand-side marketers actually want from events in a post-remote world And how to build stronger sponsor-attendee matchmaking and content alignment Picture this: instead of awkward badge scans, you're having real conversations over dinner, sharing challenges in closed-door roundtables, and walking away with warm leads who already know, like, and trust you.Stay to the end, where Jon shares his one non-negotiable rule for evaluating event ROI—and how to spot a conference worth investing in before you spend a dollar.If you're investing in events this year, this episode is your edge.Hit follow, drop a rating, and share it with your field marketing or partnerships lead—because pipeline starts before the pitch.Let's go!Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:02.296):So welcome, Jon. Please introduce yourself and share your background and expertise.Jon Whitfield (00:07.832):Well, hello, Kerry. Thanks for having me on. My name is Jon Whitfield. I'm the Chief Operating Officer over at MediaPost. I've been there for a long time—I didn't realize you could be at a place for as long as 22 years. Apparently, there are other places you can work. I didn't know that. No one ever told me. I just learned that you can get other jobs at other places.Yeah, I've been at MediaPost for 22 years. I've seen a lot of things change over the years, and yeah, we're thrilled just to still be kicking and doing our thing.Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:46.176):Excellent. Well, I know you've become the expert at events, and in my own experience with MediaPost, you've curated a really valuable experience for both brands, attendees, and sponsors. I want to dive into your expertise and help marketers and sponsors get more out of their conferences—and really think about what that investment looks like.We're seeing more and more value put into face-to-face relationship-building and brand-building. Conferences offer that, right? Talk about how you've seen the industry evolve and what you're seeing today.Jon Whitfield (01:38.716):Yeah, I mean, it's funny. When I first started out in this business, you had real tentpole events—like the ad:techs and the SESs of the world—that had 300 exhibitors and thousands of attendees. These were real, large gatherings that happened several times a year. If you weren't at those—whether as an exhibitor or an attendee—you kind of didn't exist. It was like, “We've got to be there.”So in the early 2000s and through the first decade of the new millennium, those large shows were really commonplace and important.We participated not only as exhibitors but also by launching our own conference series called OMMA Global, which had a couple of thousand people, 150 exhibitors, and was a two-day, multi-track content event. It was a big lift. It wasn't easy to put together or manage.But after five or six years of doing that, we realized it was really difficult to go back to our sponsor pool and guarantee them the ROI they were looking for. Because with large events, you're not really in control of the experience. You're kind of leaving it to chance: maybe someone good stops by a booth, maybe there's a follow-up, maybe someone connects at the cocktail party, maybe someone attends the sponsored presentation.Sometimes you get four people in the room, sometimes 50—you're just not in control. Over time, we learned that the more control you have over the experience—and the more you're involved in it—the more satisfied everyone will be: sponsors, attendees, everyone.Kerry Curran, RBMA (03:28.800):Right.Jon Whitfield (04:15.984):Exactly. And so, we just evolved. You've still got the big tentpole events like CES that serve a purpose. But I don't know many people in advertising or marketing who come back from CES saying, “I got a ton of business from that.”You want to be seen there, like at Cannes. These large shows are viable, but as a business, we found we couldn't deliver on the experience we promised. That's why we transitioned to smaller settings, like our Summit Series.Kerry Curran, RBMA (05:15.244):Yeah, and I've been to a number of your events as well as the big shows. I agree—both as a sponsor and as an attendee—with the smaller, more niche, intimate events, relationship-building becomes much more organic. You're on the bus to dinner, at happy hour, or even horseback riding. There's so much more opportunity to build meaningful relationships.Jon Whitfield (05:46.884):Yeah, in a smaller setting, you really get to know people. It's almost like dating. They're testing you out, seeing how you are in different environments, and you're a direct reflection of the business you're there to represent.When the event ends, they have a pretty good sense of, “Do I want to work with this person?” Or maybe, “That didn't really work out.” You don't get that level of intimacy when you're just scanning badges at a big conference. You're not getting that.So we value time spent in different environments—not just in a conference room, but also on the bus, during a golf round, throwing axes, horseback riding, whatever it is. You really see people's true selves in those environments, and that translates into better business relationships. At least, that's what we think.Kerry Curran, RBMA (07:04.492):Yeah, no—and again, I've loved it. I often describe your events as almost like destination weddings. By the end of three days, you're best friends with everyone. You've cultivated a really unique culture within your events, where the sponsors all get to know each other, and everyone's been so willing to have conversations and learn from each other.Jon Whitfield (07:43.888):Absolutely. It's something we've tinkered with for years. It's never perfect. Things happen—weather, logistics—that can muddy things up. But if you have the basic formula down and you've tried it enough times, you can predict, “This is going to be a good one.”We've been doing our Email Summit for 19 years, twice a year. We've been doing our Performance Marketing Summit (formerly Search & Performance) for 19 years. These are tried-and-true programs.And I always ask our sponsors: What's a customer worth to you? What do we need to do to deliver not just one, but two, three, four customers? We want to knock it out of the park. If a customer is worth more than their investment, that's great—I can deliver that. But if the customer value is low and the investment is high, that's a math problem.So we work backward from that. How do we get each supporter to a place of success? That's how we approach it.Jon Whitfield (09:11.312):That's great—because I can deliver that. But if they're investing a ton and their customer value is very low, then there's a math problem, right? So it's about figuring out how we get those individuals who support our events to a place of success. That's how we approach it. We start kind of backward and move forward—and then do our best to deliver on the promise.Kerry Curran, RBMA (09:35.087):Yeah, no, that makes so much sense. And it's smart to think of it that way. Everyone needs ROI on their investments. So when you're talking to sponsors—say a new ad tech, martech, or agency reaches out and wants to sponsor—what are they usually looking for in a conference experience?Jon Whitfield (09:58.756):Well, it kind of depends on what the product is. Some of our sponsors have a more technical platform or need more time to explain their value—they might need a visual or demo. So they might want to sponsor a presentation where they get 10 minutes to show and educate everyone on who they are, what they do, and why they matter in the overall ecosystem.Others don't need that much time. They're like, “Here's what we do, here are a few of our customers, and we'd like to sponsor the brewery tour,” or “Let's take everyone on a cool boat ride.” It's more about creating a memorable experience and attaching your name to something we've built—where all boats rise. You mentioned competitors—at our events, sponsors often become frenemies. They all understand they're there for the same reason. So we keep it positive. Let's all try to win. There's no reason to make it awkward.So yeah, it really depends on what the sponsor is trying to achieve. We just recommend what we know works, based on years and years of doing these.Kerry Curran, RBMA (11:28.674):Yeah, and I like what you pointed out about branding and associating your brand with the audience. Especially in B2B, that's such a challenge. So many brands I talk to are focused on lower funnel—"I just need the sales"—but they forget their audience has to have heard of them and liked them first. The conference environment is a really effective and efficient way to do that.Jon Whitfield (11:59.534):Exactly. You also asked me earlier about how things have evolved over time—and, of course, we had this little thing called COVID in between. We were doing fine leading into it, but coming out of COVID was rough. We couldn't do in-person events, so we pivoted to virtual—Zoom events, video panels. They were fine for keeping the community connected, but nothing compares to in-person relationship-building.In 2021, 2022, and 2023, I'd start each show by asking the audience, “Raise your hand if this is your first summit.” A lot of hands would go up. Then I'd ask, “Are you still primarily working remotely?” And again—almost everyone raised their hands.And if I asked today, I'd still get a majority. So when we talk about the viability of events—how are you going to meet people if no one's in an office anymore? Are you going to go to their house? Meet at a local Starbucks? At some point, it lands back on events. And yeah, we've been fortunate to benefit from that shift.Kerry Curran, RBMA (13:15.752):Yeah.Jon Whitfield (13:25.592):I still think there's this broad shift away from full-time, in-office work. And that really emphasizes the value of in-person gatherings—big or small.Kerry Curran, RBMA (13:41.239):I completely agree. And vendors can't do lunch-and-learns like they used to, either—not if the agency or brand team is fully remote or just more dispersed. So conferences become a valuable way to introduce your brand, tease interest, and build toward a deeper sales conversation or demo.Now, we've talked about sponsors. But the other critical audience is the attendees. Your target audience is brand-side marketers across different industries and verticals. From their perspective, what are they looking for in a conference? What do they find at MediaPost?Jon Whitfield (14:41.604):When brands come together at our events, they're looking for like-minded individuals going through similar challenges. You might have someone who runs email for American Airlines sitting next to someone managing email for a restaurant chain—and they're facing the same problems.It might be deliverability. It might be creative. It might be open rates. That's just one example, but a lot of marketers want a platform where they can share ideas, collaborate, trade war stories, and ask questions—even what they think might be dumb questions—in a safe environment where they'll get real help and honest answers.So when they get back to the office on Monday, they're equipped with real insights and action items. That's the big thing.The sponsors—the vendors and platforms—provide the tools. They're the ones building solutions to help marketers do their jobs better.I always say this at our conferences: MediaPost doesn't really provide a takeaway in the traditional sense—no binders, no decks. The takeaway is the connection. It's the chance to meet tech solution providers who are working hard to make marketers' lives easier and more effective.We create the space for those connections to happen—in an intimate way, where people can really spend time together, share ideas, riff off each other, and see where it goes.I think that's what our buyers—the marketers—really want. And here's the thing: they get calls all the time from our sponsors before the event and they never answer the phone. They're busy people. But then they come to the event and say, “Oh my god, you've been calling me for months. I never picked up. But I watched your presentation—it was amazing. Let's set up a test next week.”We hear that story over and over again. It's not that marketers don't want to learn about these technologies—it's that their day-to-day is packed. So events give them the breathing room to explore.Kerry Curran, RBMA (17:08.846):Yeah, definitely. And to your point, it's so important for marketers to stay on top of the latest technology, platforms, publishers. You give them an environment to learn from peers and providers. You also do a great job balancing content and networking. Talk a bit about your approach to content and the roundtables.Jon Whitfield (17:56.014):Yeah. All of our content is built for the marketer—the buyer, the brand-side attendee. Our panels, our keynotes, anything that's not sponsored is programmed with that in mind.We want to highlight best practices and challenges from the main stage so that people can identify with what's being shared. That content sets the stage for deeper conversations later—whether it's during an activity, a reception, or dinner. It plants seeds that grow over three days.These aren't one-day fly-in events. You're invested. You're present. You're there to grow. From a content perspective, we always ask the marketer or agency side: What are your struggles? What are your wins? What lessons can you share?Kerry Curran, RBMA (18:53.730):Yeah.Jon Whitfield (19:23.664):And then, when it's a sponsor's turn—okay, you've got 10 minutes—riff on what you heard. Build on it if you want. But mostly, tell us who you are, what you do, what value you offer. We want a pitch. Show us the dashboard. Show us who your customers are. Be clear.That's how we do it. We don't cross-pollinate the content. You've spoken at our events—you know we keep it church and state. We program the editorial content. And we expect sponsors to bring equally valuable content that's insightful and impactful.That's how we create a full, engaging morning of sessions.Kerry Curran, RBMA (20:28.556):Absolutely. And you do a great job curating senior-level speakers and timely themes that reflect what marketers in those verticals are really facing.I've always found that valuable. And one of my favorite parts? Your roundtables. Like you always say—mics off, real talk. That's when people ask the questions they're afraid to ask on stage. And it's just as valuable for the sponsors—they get to hear firsthand what their audience is struggling with and start a meaningful conversation right then and there.Jon Whitfield (21:51.652):Yep.Kerry Curran, RBMA (21:56.417):It's all about building real, mutually beneficial relationships—and you've created a space that does that so well.Jon Whitfield (22:05.208):Thanks. And yeah—we've had feedback that if we could run an entire summit with just roundtables, people would love it. They're so impactful. You turn off the cameras, and people get honest.Unfortunately, there are only so many hours in the day, but those roundtables consistently get top marks in our post-show surveys.Kerry Curran, RBMA (22:41.484):I believe it.Kerry Curran, RBMA (22:41.484):I definitely agree. Jon, this has been incredibly helpful. I think it's important for everyone listening to be reminded just how valuable event investments can be—from education to relationship-building to, ultimately, driving sales.So for those tuning in who want to ramp up their event strategy—or need to build a business case for budget from their CFO—what's your recommendation for getting started?Jon Whitfield (23:18.244):Start by comparing the costs. What's your total investment going to be to sponsor an event? It's not inexpensive. There's travel, hotels, time. If you're a vendor or sponsor, it's not the cheapest thing in the world.So go back to that question: What's a customer worth to you?How are you currently getting customers? Are you converting through digital-only channels? Maybe you're just selling widgets and don't need in-person interaction. Fine. But if you're in a consultative or technical sale where FaceTime matters, then events are going to pay dividends.If you're trying to decide which events to support, here's what I tell people: Look at whether the sponsors from two or three years ago are still coming back. If they're not, run for the hills. That's a red flag. It means the experience didn't deliver.Look at our Email Insider Summit. We've been running it for 19 years. And for at least the past 10, you'll see many of the same companies sponsoring over and over. That doesn't happen by accident. It takes hard work. You have to care deeply about the experience and the investment people are making—your sponsors, your ticket buyers.That's something we believe in strongly. Maybe that's why we're still around. But yeah—do your homework. Know what a customer is worth to you. Run the numbers. You have to get ROI from these things. That's just the bottom line.Kerry Curran, RBMA (25:36.471):I totally agree. And one thing to level-set with your CFO is: you're probably not going to see ROI immediately. Depending on what you're selling, it might be three to six months down the road.If you come home without a signed contract, it doesn't mean it wasn't a success—it just means you're playing a longer game.And I know you also do a great job customizing sponsor opportunities at your events.Jon Whitfield (26:18.788):Yeah, it's all about knowing who you are as a company. What do you want to be known for? Is it education? Is it fun? Is it gifts?Every brand has its own playbook. That's why we offer a variety of sponsorship options—because everyone has a different goal when they come to an event.Kerry Curran, RBMA (26:59.630):Exactly. There's so much flexibility. One-on-one meetings. Content partnerships. Webinars. Lots of ways to extend the experience beyond the event.And one more thing we didn't touch on—brand attendees. You have some great senior-level VIP opportunities, right?Jon Whitfield (27:21.668):Absolutely. For this model to work, we need a strong brand-side presence—decision-makers, people with media and marketing budgets, people who want to network and learn.That's the lifeblood of our business. And we're always looking to bring in new marketers doing interesting things.That's part of what keeps this exciting. Even something as “old” as email is constantly evolving. There are always new tools and trends—whether it's AI, chatGPT, TikTok, or whatever else is coming.So yeah, we need marketers who want to tell their stories, who want to improve, and who want to meet others doing the same.Kerry Curran, RBMA (29:21.070):And that's how you pitch it to your boss. “Yes, I'm going to Amelia Island—but look who else will be there. Look at the brands and tech providers I'll be learning from.” You come back with insights and a full notebook, and your higher-ups will be glad you went.Jon Whitfield (29:47.044):Exactly. And yes—senior marketers can qualify for our VIP passes. We have a set number of those for each event. Once they're gone, they're gone.We also cap the total audience to keep the buyer-to-seller ratio balanced—usually around 1:1. It's typically 90–100 people: half brand-side, half sponsors. That way, everyone gets time to connect. And if by day three you haven't met who you need to meet—you stayed in your room too long!Kerry Curran, RBMA (30:48.834):Well, I can say I'm still close with many of the marketers and vendors I've met at your events. I always recommend your summits because they're high-value, well-structured, and genuinely productive.So, Jon—if someone wants to get in touch to learn more, how can they find you?Jon Whitfield (31:29.036):Well, not that I need more email—but you can reach me at Jon@MediaPost.com. If you're interested in sponsorships, my right-hand man Seth Oilman is your guy—Seth@MediaPost.com. He's our CRO and runs the sponsorship side.Reach out, and I'll point you in the right direction.Kerry Curran, RBMA (31:54.624):Excellent. We'll include all of that in the show notes—and make sure everyone mentions they heard you here!Jon Whitfield (32:02.552):Thanks again, Kerry. You've been such a great supporter and advocate for years. We appreciate all you've done—and don't stop!Kerry Curran, RBMA (32:17.550):Thanks, Jon. I believe in what you're doing and love being part of it. Can't wait to see you again soon!Jon Whitfield (32:30.884):You got it. Can't wait.Thanks again to Jon Whitfield for pulling back the curtain on what makes events actually drive results. Here's what we're walking away with: big expos can generate visibility, but intimate events create trust and conversions. ROI starts with one question—what's a customer worth to you? Events should be evaluated not just on cost, but on continuity, brand fit, and customer alignment.If this sparked ideas for your event or sponsor strategy, share it with your team—and let us know what resonated. Don't forget to subscribe, review, and follow Revenue Boost: A Marketing Podcast. To learn more, visit revenuebasedmarketing.com and follow me, Kerry Curran, on LinkedIn. Flat or slowing revenue? Let's fix that—fast.Revenue Boost: A Marketing Podcast delivers the proven plays, sharp insights, and “steal-this-today” tactics that high-growth teams swear by.Follow / Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, and YouTubeTap ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ if the insights move your metrics—every rating fuels more game-changing episodes

In this episode of CRO Spotlight, Warren Zenna speaks with Adam Crandall, CRO at Addtronics, about his journey from VP of Sales to Chief Revenue Officer in a private equity-backed environment. Adam shares how he developed a scalable go-to-market playbook for Addtronics, a platform acquiring robotics and automation companies focused on advancing human health and technology.Adam discusses the critical distinction between simply hitting revenue targets and building truly scalable revenue systems. He explains his concept of "Revenue Generating Activities" (RGAs) and how he balances centralized strategy with decentralized execution across multiple operating companies. The conversation explores how a CRO must empower teams with tools and processes that function effectively without constant oversight.The episode delves into the unique challenges of the CRO role in private equity, including managing expectations, forecasting accurately, and maintaining team energy through challenging periods. Adam emphasizes the importance of hiring people smarter than yourself, approaching new roles with humility, and maintaining close alignment with the CFO and CEO to navigate market headwinds.Warren and Adam explore the balance between measurable and unmeasurable marketing activities, the importance of brand building, and the essential competencies for today's CROs. Adam shares valuable insights for aspiring and newly appointed CROs, making this a must-listen for revenue leaders looking to excel in complex business environments.

Ivan Zhao joins Joubin Mirzadegan on Grit to break down how the company's minimalist design became a strategic edge in a world overwhelmed by bloated software. He shares why the AI agent still hasn't arrived, and how Notion's modular approach might be the closest thing to making it real.Guest: Ivan Zhao, co-founder and CEO of NotionMentioned in this episode: Fuzzy Khosrowshahi, Airbnb, Sequoia Capital, Linear, Figma, Apple, Things, Microsoft, BMW, Lumiere, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Rippling, Matt MacInnis, Inkling, Steve Jobs, Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay, Bill Gates, OpenAI ChatGPT, Y Combinator, Andrej Karpathy, Toby Schachman, Simon Last, Spotify, SlackConnect with Ivan ZhaoXLinkedInConnect with JoubinXLinkedInEmail: grit@kleinerperkins.comLearn more about Kleiner Perkins

Productivity. What if you could reinvent productivity in your contracting business? The top line may not increase…then again it might. Improving productivity, or reinventing productivity will definitely improve your bottom line. How do you do it? My guest, James Hatfield, answers this question. James started out as the owner of a painting and power washing company and became passionate about helping contracting professionals save time and make more money. James is now the CRO at LiveSwitch, a global technology company that serves the trades and other small businesses. Free P&L Statement and Balance Sheet https://tinyurl.com/2rjd6wxu Ruth King Twitter - @RuthKing LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruthking1/   Podcast Produced by Nick Uttam https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-uttam-4b33a1147

In this short segment of the Revenue Builders Podcast, we revisit the discussion with veteran sales leader and CRO of RegScale, Eric Erston, to unpack what truly sets top-performing sales teams apart. From the importance of laser focus and understanding your ideal customer persona to evolving qualification strategies and leveraging modern tools to decode human motivation — Eric shares hard-won wisdom from decades in enterprise sales and leadership. Whether you're a rep or a revenue leader, this conversation reveals why success depends on where you spend your time — and who you spend it with.KEY TAKEAWAYS[00:00:25] Top performers exhibit relentless focus — not just on numbers but on aligning activity with outcomes.[00:01:10] Teams with process clarity and metric discipline stand in stark contrast to disorganized teams[00:01:52] The “measure twice, cut once” principle applies in sales — especially in qualification and time prioritization.[00:02:16] Beyond BANT: Success requires knowing the ideal company profile and persona profile — both matter deeply.[00:03:14] Not all CISOs are equal — role scope and influence vary by industry and product category.[00:03:54] Many teams ignore the depth of the human behind the persona — a costly oversight.[00:04:16] Use modern tools (social, blogs, panels, LinkedIn) to research what excites and motivates decision-makers.[00:05:36] There's a work persona and a human persona — both drive behavior. Understand them both.[00:06:00] Success in scale comes not from personal talent, but repeatable frameworks others can execute.QUOTES[00:00:25] "Top performers are always focused… focused on what they sell, their metrics, and what success actually looks like.[00:01:52] "Measure twice, cut once — you can't qualify without knowing what success looks like.[00:02:38] "I didn't spend enough time thinking about the role of the human… I thought if you get to the exec, you're good. Well, maybe."[00:03:54] "We know how they're measured — but we rarely go deeper into what drives them as a person."[00:06:49] "As a seller, I could get deals done. But when you're leading a team, you realize you have to teach those nuances."Listen to the full conversation through the link below.https://revenue-builders.simplecast.com/episodes/mastering-sales-leadership-with-eric-erstonEnjoying the podcast? Sign up to receive new episodes straight to your inbox:https://hubs.li/Q02R10xN0Check out John McMahon's book here:Amazon Link: https://a.co/d/1K7DDC4Check out Force Management's Ascender platform here: https://my.ascender.co/Ascender/

Are you in the messy middle of growth, struggling to scale sustainably, or just craving more freedom without dropping balls? In this episode of The Agency Blueprint, I'm joined by Taylor Frame, co-owner and CRO of Best Practice Media, to discuss everything from systems building and team autonomy to the emotional rollercoaster of entrepreneurship. He opens up about what it takes to scale a successful digital agency from launching over 100 e-commerce brands to six-figure months to building a team of 30+ full-time staff. Listen in to learn the importance of time tracking, SOPs, and team delegation for service-based agency owners. You will also learn the importance of surrounding yourself with business-minded peers who understand your struggles. Key Questions: [01:18] How was your journey through Best Practice Media, and how was it different from your first agency? [09:55] What does grit actually look like when the results don't match the effort, and clients still walk away? [17:00] What do you do when you feel like you're in the "swamp" of business, when nothing is going right, and you're getting hit left and right? [22:45] Do you run your agency by the numbers — and if not, how can embracing metrics give you clarity? [32:02] If you could go back to when you were earning $20K/month as a freelancer, what advice would you give yourself?” What You'll Discover: [01:33] How Taylor “accidentally” became an agency owner and why systems and infrastructure are non-negotiable for true growth. [05:03] How self-limiting beliefs around systems can become your ceiling and hold everyone back. [08:03] How to use the 1-3-1 model to train your team to bring you clear problems, multiple solutions, and a recommended decision. [10:20] The mental toughness required to run a service business, even when clients leave despite strong results. [14:22] How separating business success from personal worth can be essential to staying sane and grounded as a founder. [17:36] The mindset and tactical frameworks needed to get you off the trenches of difficulty and stabilize your agency. [20:58] The importance of building a culture of systems to protect your team's bandwidth and prevent burnout. [23:11] The three sets of numbers Best Practice Media uses: P&L for fiscal health, client health scores, and team bandwidth tracking. [28:15] How to define success from the client's perspective to stay aligned and measure the right outcomes. [29:50] How Taylor's agency is investing in AI to remove repetitive tasks from the team's plates, enabling them to become strategic thinkers. [32:14] The power of documenting everything with SOPs and always working to get things off your plate. [35:18] The importance of surrounding yourself with other business owners who understand your struggles. Connect with Taylor: WebsiteLinkedIn

Dive into a conversation with Kyle Norton, CRO of Owner.com, as he reveals the journey of addressing churn in a fast-growing SMB-focused business. Kyle discusses the challenges of identifying the true causes of churn and the strategic decisions required to improve retention. This episode offers valuable insights for leaders managing high-growth companies looking to refine their customer success strategies and enhance product value perception. Revenue Blindspots is brought to you by Otter.ai. To learn more, visit https://get.otter.ai/samjacobs/

In this episode of the Revenue Builders Podcast, hosts John McMahon and John Kaplan welcome Steve McCluskey to delve into the essentials of data-driven sales leadership. They discuss why a foundational "playbook" is crucial before implementing metrics, how to balance activity with accomplishment, and the importance of creating a simple, effective operating rhythm. Drawing on extensive experience, Steve shares practical examples, like the "Magnificent Seven" principle, to illustrate how leaders can use data not for micromanagement, but for targeted coaching, developing talent, and ultimately, driving predictable revenue growth.ADDITIONAL RESOURCESLearn more about Steve McCluskey:https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevemccluskey/Watch Force Management's Panel Discussion on AI in Sales Leadership: https://hubs.ly/Q03rlW4ZDownload the CRO Strategy Checklist: https://hubs.li/Q03f8LmX0Enjoying the podcast? Sign up to receive new episodes straight to your inbox: https://hubs.li/Q02R10xN0HERE ARE SOME KEY SECTIONS TO CHECK OUT[00:01:45] The Playbook: The Foundation of Data-Driven Leadership[00:06:12] The Three Dimensions of Sales Metrics[00:08:30] Balancing Activity vs. Accomplishment[00:13:21] The "Magnificent Seven": Learning from Top Performers[00:19:05] Adapting the Playbook to the Buyer's Journey[00:21:48] Holding Leaders Accountable for New Rep Ramp Time[00:29:45] Rock Management: How to Settle on the Critical Few Metrics[00:34:10] The Importance of a Cross-Functional Operating Rhythm[00:41:02] Why Data is Just the Starting Point for Coaching[00:44:31] Churn, Accountability, and Regretted Attrition[00:46:15] The Criticality of a Rep's First Deal[00:52:19] Management vs. Leadership: It's a Mindset[00:55:01] The Power of Simplicity in Metrics[00:58:12] Getting Emotionally Connected to MeasurementHIGHLIGHT QUOTES"I don't think that data-driven leadership really means anything without that playbook foundation.""One man's micromanagement is another man's success formula. It's just mindset.""The biggest point of leadership is the coaching aspect of it. You're not gonna read a list of metrics and be able to tell somebody what they're doing great... You have to watch the swing.""People don't leave their job. They leave their leaders.""If you can navigate that simply and, and in a, you know, through those metrics, that's so important. But then the second piece... is the difference between management and leadership."

In this session, CRO of ServiceTitan, Ross Biestman, and Chemistry's Managing Partner and Co-Founder, Kristina Shen, discuss ServiceTitan's founding principles and growth from a small company to a $11 billion vertical SaaS leader. Together they cover ServiceTitan's mission-driven approach, and its successful adoption of AI for operational efficiency. Ross shares personal anecdotes about customer interactions and pivotal moments leading to ServiceTitan's massive success. The episode underscores the importance of on-site customer interactions and the role of AI and disciplined expansion in their growth strategy. ------------------ This episode of the SaaStr podcast is sponsored by: get.tech The best .coms are taken or overpriced. So you settle on a workaround domain for your website. Don't compromise. Get a clean, sharp .tech domain that instantly says: this is a tech startup. Grab yours at get.tech/saastr or via domain registrars like GoDaddy. ------------------ Hey everybody, SaaStr AI's next stop takes us to London on December 2nd and 3rd! It's Christmas with SaaStr and 2,000 of the best SaaS and AI leaders. The biggest names will be there. The best networking.  Early adopter tickets are selling faster than we expected. So don't wait. With only 5 months until the event, we expect this year's SaaStr London event to sell out to capacity.  Use my code jason20pod for exclusive savings. Get your tickets now at podcast.saastrlondon.com or use code jason20pod at checkout. SaaStr AI London – where SaaS Meets AI in London. See you there. ------------------ Hey everybody, SaaStr Annual will be back in May of 2026.  The world's largest SaaS + AI gathering for executives. Just this May we hosted: 10,000 attendees with 68% VP-level and above, 36% CEOs and founders and a growing 25% were AI-first professionals. This is the very best of the best S-tier attendees and decision makers that come to SaaStr each year.  But here's the reality, folks: the longer you wait, the higher ticket prices can get. Early bird tickets are available now, but once they're gone, you'll pay hundreds more so don't wait. Lock in your spot today. Use my code JASON100 for exclusive savings. Get your tickets at podcast.saastrannual.com or use code JASON100 at checkout. 

For episode 560 of the BlockHash Podcast, host Brandon Zemp is joined by Andrew Vranjes, CRO of Blockdaemon while at Permissionless 4.Previously, Andrew was VP and GM at APAC, where he has successfully led regional growth, forged strategic partnerships, and expanded market presence in the Asia Pacific Region.  Prior to joining Blockdaemon, Andrew has held leadership roles in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cisco Systems and Singtel/Optus. In AWS, Andrew built out the teams focussed on Startups, Digital Natives, Crypto/Fintech and AWS's partnerships with the Venture Capital and Private Equity community.  ⏳ Timestamps: 0:00 | Introduction1:00 | Who is Andrew Vranjes?3:34 | Blockdaemon explained5:30 | RWAs & Tokenization9:00 | Blockdaemon roadmap10:37 | Blockdaemon at Permissionless13:07 | RAPID FIRE SESSION

Jeff Hoffman (Founder & Chief Revenue Officer, Jeff Hoffman, CRO), who shared best practices and strategies on how to gear teams up for phenomenal business success. Jeff highlighted the disconnect that arises when marketing teams hand off unqualified leads to sales. He also emphasized the need for creating a collaborative sales and marketing framework, including sales involvement in lead generation and developing marketing strategies.

This week on Revenue Rehab, Brandi Starr is joined by Alan Gold and Paul Peterson, seasoned fractional CMOs who believe fractured C-suite ownership of revenue is costing your company millions, and they're here to prove it. In this episode, they challenge the widespread idea that multiple executives should own revenue, instead making the case that a single CRO needs to drive accountability, alignment, and results. Gold and Peterson uncover the hidden costs of scattered leadership and reveal why true revenue growth depends on unified strategy, clear lines of ownership, and business-wide metrics. Are they right, or will you challenge their thinking? Dive in and join the debate.  Episode Type: Problem Solving - Industry analysts, consultants, and founders take a bold stance on critical revenue challenges, offering insights you won't hear anywhere else. These episodes explore common industry challenges and potential solutions through expert insights and varied perspectives.  Bullet Points of Key Topics + Chapter Markers:  Topic #1: Splitting Revenue Leadership Creates Chaos, Not Accountability [02:28]  Alan Gold argues that dividing revenue responsibility among multiple C-suite leaders leads to dysfunction and wasted budget. He states, “If everyone's in charge, no one's in charge. Period. End,” urging companies to consolidate revenue ownership under a single accountable leader. This challenges the widespread belief that shared responsibility drives alignment and highlights the risk of finger-pointing and lack of true accountability.  Topic #2: One Revenue Number Alone Does Not Unite the Team [06:25]  Alan Gold dismisses the idea that giving multiple executives the same revenue goal will align efforts, describing it as “a lot of BS.” He explains that shared metrics do not guarantee unified strategy or execution, insisting that only a single leader, ideally a CRO with broad strategic skills, can effectively drive the revenue engine. This perspective pushes revenue leaders to look beyond revops and metrics, focusing instead on organizational design and true accountability.  Topic #3: C-Level Career Progression Requires Broader Business Acumen [18:33]  Paul Peterson addresses the career fears that drive resistance to a single revenue leader, emphasizing that C-suite advancement requires understanding the entire business, not just one function. He explains that to be qualified as CRO, leaders must “actually get good at what my counterpart is doing,” echoing the CEO role as a business integrator rather than a functional expert. This challenges conventional thinking around executive career paths and motivates marketing and sales leaders to develop broader skills if they aspire to top revenue roles.  The Most Damaging Myth  The Myth: “If we give each leader the same metrics to be accountable for, so instead of sending everybody in all these different directions, if we still have one number but multiple people, it accomplishes the same thing.” (Alan Gold)  Why It's Wrong: Alan Gold explains that this belief actually complicates things further and fails to deliver true alignment. Even with a single shared metric, multiple leaders will continue to pull in their own directions based on their functional backgrounds, resulting in silos, duplicated efforts, and ongoing finger-pointing. Ultimately, this diffusion of responsibility means no one is truly accountable for revenue outcomes.  What Companies Should Do Instead: Appoint one leader, such as a strategically-oriented CRO, to oversee the entire revenue process. This creates clear accountability, streamlines decision making, and ensures all teams work in harmony toward unified revenue goals.  The Rapid-Fire Round  What is the first sign that a company is facing a C suite being too big problem, but hasn't really named it yet?  “If the CEO can't get a straight answer to what the future looks like and what the revenue stream is for the next quarter. Create unified visibility into your revenue forecast.” – Alan Gold What's one mindset shift that unlocks progress? “It's the mindset of strategic delegation. Clarify who owns what, and make sure someone is accountable for connecting the dots. Marketing, sales, revenue, customer service. They all have to work together. The real shift is realizing they can't function independently. One person has to own the alignment.” – Paul Peterson What's the most common mistake people make when trying to fix this? “Just following what you've always done before, instead of stepping back to question whether the current structure and people are right for today's market.” – Alan Gold What's the most underrated move that actually works to fix this fast? “Go back to the data: analyze your sales process from prospect to closed revenue, review key metrics like close rate and cost per lead, and make sure someone is asking these questions every day.” – Paul Peterson   Links: Alan Gold  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alanegold/   Email: alan.gold@techcxo.com   Links: Paul Peterson  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulpeterson52   Subscribe, listen, and rate/review Revenue Rehab Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts , Amazon Music, or iHeart Radio and find more episodes on our website RevenueRehab.live  

This conversation hit different. JR Butler went from Division I hockey at Holy Cross to building a company that got acquired by IBM for $2 billion. But the path wasn't straight. And it definitely wasn't easy. JR's story starts in a bar after a men's league hockey game. He was planning to go to law school. Study for the LSAT. Take the traditional route. Then he met a guy who owned a VAR who told him technology was the future. Guaranteed him he could make a quarter million in three years. JR said screw it. Decided to try tech sales instead of studying for the LSAT. By his third day he knew this was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. But here's where it gets real. JR grew up as the oldest of three boys. All three played Division I hockey. One of his brothers was an Olympic athlete who played in the NHL. When JR asked his dad when he knew his brother Bobby would make the NHL his dad said he knew when Bobby was seven. That creates a dynamic. The naturally gifted kid gets the attention. The oldest learns to fend for himself. JR had to find his own lane. He wasn't the most talented hockey player. But he was accountable. Self-reliant. He learned to bet on himself. That translated perfectly to sales where you eat what you kill and it's 100% on you. Extreme ownership became his foundation. This episode is about finding your lane when you're not the most naturally gifted. About learning from failure. About transferring skills from one arena to another. And about building something meaningful from your own struggle.We Meet:Connect:Connect with Rick: https://linktr.ee/mrrickjordanConnect with JR: https://www.shiftgroup.io/ Subscribe & Review to ALL IN with Rick Jordan on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/RickJordanALLINAbout JR: JR Butler is the Founder and CEO of Shift Group, a sales recruiting and training firm that specializes in helping college, professional, and Olympic athletes transition into the world of Technology Sales. Prior to starting Shift Group, JR was Chief Revenue Officer at Pillir, a fast growth low code software company out of Arizona. Prior to becoming a CRO, JR built and ran multiple sales teams at Turbonomic, helping the company go from a Series A start up to a $2B acquisition by IBM. JR grew up playing multiple sports but went on to play Division 1 hockey at Holy Cross in central Massachusetts where he grew up. He was a sophomore on the 2006 team that beat Minnesota in the biggest upset in College hockey history. JR comes from a hockey family, with two brothers that played at the college level, with one going on to play in the NHL and the Olympics and a father whose in the Massachusetts Hockey coaches hall of fame.

Lightning Round: Top 10 Ways to Fill a Dry Pipeline Question: Mike from San Diego asks, “I am the CRO of a large DME company and we have been experiencing strong growth—organic and through acquisitions. And experiencing all that comes with that: disorganization, constant shifts in strategy and structure and I am really worried we have lost our focus on keeping customers. We have no problems getting new customers, but I am really worried about our retention rate. How do I get my team to focus on both? and should I? Love the show by the way - make my entire team listen to it.” Book: How to Get a Meeting with Anyone by Stu Heinecke  

“Manager and leader”? What's the difference. During my conversation this time with Scott Hanton, our guest, we will discuss this very point along with many other fascinating and interesting subjects. As Scott tells us at the beginning of this episode he grew up asking “why” about most anything you can think of. He always was a “why” asker. As he tells it, unlike many children who grow out of the phase of asking “why” he did not. He still asks “why” to this very day.   At the age of 13 Scott decided that he wanted to be a chemist. He tells us how this decision came about and why he has always stayed with it. Scott received his bachelor's degree in Chemistry from Michigan State and his PHD from the University of Wisconsin. Again, why he changed schools for his PHD work is an interesting story. As you will see, Scott tells stories in a unique and quite articulate way.   After his university days were over Scott went to work, yes as a chemist. He tells us about this and how after 20 years with one company how and why he moved to another company and somewhat out of constant lab work into some of the management, business and leadership side of a second company. He stayed there for ten years and was laid off during the pandemic. Scott then found employment as the editorial director of Lab Management Magazine where he got to bring his love of teaching to the forefront of his work.   My hour with Scott gives us all many insights into management, leadership and how to combine the two to create a strong teaming environment. I believe you will find Scott's thoughts extremely poignant and helpful in everything that you do.     About the Guest:   Scott Hanton is the Editorial Director of Lab Manager. He spent 30 years as a research chemist, lab manager, and business leader at Air Products and Intertek. Scott thrives on the challenges of problem-solving. He enjoys research, investigation, and collaboration. Scott is a people-centric, servant leader. He is motivated by developing environments where people can grow and succeed, and crafting roles for people that take advantage of their strengths.   Scott earned a BS in chemistry from Michigan State University and a PhD in physical chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is an active member of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the American Society of Mass Spectrometry (ASMS), and the Association of Lab Managers (ALMA). As a scientist Scott values curiosity, innovation, progress, and delivery of results. Scott has always been motivated by questions beginning with why. Studying physical chemistry in graduate school offered the opportunity to hone answers to these questions. As a professional scientist, Scott worked in analytical chemistry specializing in MALDI mass spectrometry and polymer characterization.   At Scott married his high school sweetheart, and they have one son. Scott is motivated by excellence, happiness, and kindness. He most enjoys helping people and solving problems. Away from work, Scott enjoys working outside in the yard, playing strategy games, and participating in different discussion groups.   Scott values having a growth mindset and is a life-long learner. He strives to learn something new everyday and from everyone. One of the great parts of being a trained research scientist is that failure really isn't part of his vocabulary. He experiments and either experiences success or learns something new. He values both individual and organizational learning.   Scott's current role at Lab Manager encompasses three major responsibilities: ·      Writing articles and giving presentations to share his experience with lab managers. ·      Driving the creation and growth of the Lab Manager Academy (https://labmanageracademy.com/) that currently contains three certificate programs: lab management, lab safety management, and lab quality management. ·      Helping people through his knowledge of science, scientists, management, and leadership. He is very happy sharing the accumulated wisdom of his experiences as a researcher, lab supervisor, and lab manager. Each article posted on Lab Manager addresses a decision that a lab manager needs to make. Lab management is full of decision-making, so helping people make better, faster, more complete decisions is very satisfying. Ways to connect with Scott:   https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-hanton/   About the Host:   Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog.   Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards.   https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/   accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/       Thanks for listening!   Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast   If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset .   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review   Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.       Transcription Notes:   Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson ** 01:20 Well, welcome to another episode of unstoppable mindset where inclusion diversity and the unexpected meet, and mostly we get to deal with the unexpected, as opposed to inclusion or diversity. But that's okay, because unexpected is what makes life fun, and our guest today, Scott Hanton, will definitely be able to talk about that. Scott has been a research chemist. He comes from the chemistry world, so he and I in the past have compared notes, because, of course, I come from the physics world, and I love to tell people that the most important thing I learned about physics was that, unlike Doc Brown, although I do know how to build a bomb, unlike Doc Brown from Back to the Future, I'm not dumb enough to try to go steal fissionable material from a terrorist group to build the bomb. So, you know, I suppose that's a value, value lesson somewhere. But anyway, I am really glad that you're all here with us today, and we have lots to talk about. Scott, as I said, was in chemistry and research chemist, and now is the editorial supervisor and other things for a magazine called lab manager, and we will talk about that as well. So Scott, welcome to unstoppable mindset. We're glad   Scott Hanton ** 02:38 you're here. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to have this conversation with you today.   Michael Hingson ** 02:43 Well, I think it'll be a lot of fun, and looking forward to it. Now, you're in Michigan, right?   Scott Hanton ** 02:48 That's right. I live in South Lyon, Michigan,   Michael Hingson ** 02:51 ah, what's the weather back there today?   Scott Hanton ** 02:55 It's probably about 55 degrees and cloudy   Michael Hingson ** 02:58 here today. Well, it's still fairly sunny here, and we're actually, according to my iPhone, at 71 so it was up around 80 earlier in the week, but weather changes are still going to bring some cold for a while   Scott Hanton ** 03:15 in here in Michigan, I visited a customer earlier this week, and I drove by about 1000 orange barrels on the highway, which means it's spring, because there's only two seasons in Michigan, winter and construction.   Michael Hingson ** 03:29 There you go. Yeah, I know. I went to the University of California, Irvine, UCI. And if you ask somebody who doesn't know that UCI stands for University of California at Irvine. If you ask them what UCI stands for, they'll tell you, under construction indefinitely. Sounds right? Yeah. Well, it's been doing it ever since I was there a long time ago, and they they continue to grow. Now we're up to like 32,000 fresh, or excuse me, undergraduates at the university. And when I was there, there were 2700 students. So it's grown a little. That's   Scott Hanton ** 04:05 a lot of change. I'm used to big universities. I'm a graduate of both Michigan State and the University of Wisconsin. So these are big places.   Michael Hingson ** 04:13 Wow, yeah. So you're used to it. I really enjoyed it when it was a small campus. I'm glad I went there, and that was one of the reasons that caused me to go there, was because I knew I could probably get a little bit more visibility with instructors, and that would be helpful for me to get information when they didn't describe things well in class. And it generally worked out pretty well. So I can't complain a lot. Perfect. Glad it worked well for you, it did. Well, why don't you start, if you would, by telling us kind of about the early Scott growing up and all that sort of stuff.   Scott Hanton ** 04:49 I grew up in Michigan, in a town called Saginaw. I was blessed with a family that loved me and that, you know, I was raised in a very. Supportive environment. But young Scott asked, Why about everything you know, the way kids do? Yeah, right. And my mom would tell you that when I was a kid, why was my most favorite word? And most kids outgrow that. I never did, yeah, so Me neither. I still ask why all the time. It's still my most favorite word, and it caused me to want to go explore the sciences, because what I found, as I learned about science, was that I could get answers to why questions better in science than in other places.   Michael Hingson ** 05:34 Yeah, makes sense. So what kinds of questions did you ask about why? Well, I asked   Scott Hanton ** 05:43 all kinds of questions about why, like, why are we having that for dinner? Or, why is my bedtime so early? Those questions didn't have good answers, at least from my perspective, right? But I also asked questions like, why is grass green, and why is the sky blue? And studying physical chemistry at Michigan State answered those questions. And so   Michael Hingson ** 06:03 how early did you learn about Rayleigh scattering? But that's you know?   Scott Hanton ** 06:07 Well, I learned the basic concepts from a really important teacher in my life, Mr. Leeson was my seventh grade science teacher, and what I learned from him is that I could ask questions that weren't pertinent to what he was lecturing about, and that taught me a lot about the fact that science was a lot bigger than what we got in the curriculum or in the classroom. And so Mr. Leeson was a really important person in my development, and showed me that there was that science was a lot bigger than I thought it was as a student, but I didn't really learn about rally scattering until I got to college.   Michael Hingson ** 06:43 But at the same time, it sounds like he was willing to allow you to grow and and learn, which so many people aren't willing to do. They're too impatient.   Scott Hanton ** 06:58 He was a first year teacher the year I had him so he hadn't become cynical yet. So it was great to just be able to stay after class and ask him a question, or put my hand up in class and ask him a question. He also did a whole series of demonstrations that were fabulous and made the science come to life in a way that reading about it doesn't stir the imagination. Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 07:23 I had teachers that did that too. I remember very well my freshman general science teacher in high school, Mr. Dills, and one day, and he loved to do kind of unique things, just to push the boundaries of students a little bit. He came in one day and he said, I got a pop quiz for everybody, which doesn't help me, because the pop quiz was in print, but he handed it out. And then he took me to the back of the room, and he said, You're not going to really be able to do this quiz. Let me tell you why. And he said, Oh, and one thing he said is, just be sure you follow all the instructions and you'll be fine on the test to everybody. He brought me back to the back of the room. He says, Well, here's the deal. He says, if people really read the instructions, what they'll do is they'll read the instruction that says, Read all the questions before you start answering, and if you get to the last question, it says answer only the first question, which is what is your name and and sure enough, of course, people didn't read the instructions. And he said, so I wouldn't be able to really deal with you with that one, with that whole thing, just because it wouldn't work well. And I said, I understand, but he loved to make students think, and I learned so much about the whole concept of realizing the need to observe and be observant in all that you do. And it was lessons like that from him that really helped a lot with that. For me,   Scott Hanton ** 08:48 I had a high school chemistry teacher named Mrs. Schultz, and the first experiment that we did in her class, in the first week of classes, was she wanted us to document all of the observations that we could make about a burning candle. And I was a hot shot student. Thought I, you know, owned the world, and I was going to ace this test. And, you know, I had maybe a dozen observations about a burning candle, and thought I had done a great job describing it, until she started sharing her list, and she probably had 80 observations about a burning candle, and it taught me the power of observation and the need to talk about the details of those observations and to be specific about what the observations were. And that experiment seems simple, light a candle and tell me what you see. Yeah, but that lesson has carried on with me now for more than approaching 50 years.   Michael Hingson ** 09:47 Let's see, as I recall, if you light a candle, what the center of the flame is actually pretty cool compared to the outside. It's more hollow. Now I wouldn't be able to easily tell that, because. Is my my process for observing doesn't really use eyesight to do that, so I I'm sure there are other technologies today that I could use to get more of that information. But   Scott Hanton ** 10:12 I'm also sure that that experiment could be re crafted so that it wasn't so visual, yeah, right, that there could be tactile experiments to tell me about observations or or audible experiments about observation, where you would excel in ways that I would suffer because I'm so visually dominant. The   Michael Hingson ** 10:33 issue, though, is that today, there's a lot more technology to do that than there was when I was in school and you were in school, but yeah, I think there is a lot available. There's a company called Independence Science, which is actually owned and run by Dr Cary sapollo. And Carrie is blind, and he is a blind chemist, and he wanted to help develop products for blind people to be able to deal with laboratory work. So he actually worked with a company that was, well, it's now Vernier education systems. They make a product called LabQuest with something like 80 different kinds of probes that you can attach to it, and the LabQuest will will provide visual interpretations of whatever the probes are showing carry, and independent science took that product and made it talk, so that There is now a Talking LabQuest. And the reality is that all those probes became usable because the LabQuest became accessible to be able to do that, and they put a lot of other things into it too. So it's more than just as a talking device, a lab device. It's got a periodic table in it. It's got a lot of other kinds of things that they just put in it as well. But it's really pretty cool because it now makes science a whole lot more accessible. I'm going to have to think about the different kinds of probes and how one could use that to look at a candle. I think that'd be kind of fun.   Scott Hanton ** 12:15 And it's just awesome to hear that there's innovation and space to make science more available to everybody. Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 12:23 the real problem that we face is the one that we mostly always have faced, which is societal attitudes, as opposed to really being or not being able to do the experiments, is people think we can't, and that's the barrier that we always, usually have to overcome.   Scott Hanton ** 12:39 What I find in my time as a coach, mentor, supervisor, is that if somebody believes they can't do it, they can't do it. Yeah. And so it's often about overcoming their own mental limitations, the limitations that they've placed on themselves,   Michael Hingson ** 12:56 and that's right, or unfortunately, the limitations that other people place on us, and we, all too often and weigh too much, buy into those limitations. So it's it is something that we, especially in the sciences, should recognize that we shouldn't be doing so much of. I know that when I was at UC Irvine as a graduate student, I learned once that there was a letter in my file that a professor wrote. Fortunately, I never had him as a professor, but it and I was in my master's program at the time in physics, and this guy put a letter in my file saying that no blind person could ever absorb the material to get an advanced degree in physics at the University. Just put that in there, which is so unfortunate, because the real thing that is demonstrated there is a prejudice that no scientist should ever have.   Scott Hanton ** 13:51 I'm hopeful that as you graduated, there was a retraction letter in your file as well,   Michael Hingson ** 13:57 not that I ever heard, but yeah. Well, I'd already gotten my bachelor's degree, but yeah. But you know, things happen, but it is a it is a societal thing, and society all too often creates limitations, and sometimes we don't find them right away, but it is one of the big issues that, in general, we have to deal with. And on all too often, society does some pretty strange things because it doesn't understand what science is all about. I know when we were dealing with covid, when it all started, leaving the conspiracy theorists out of it. One of the things that I learned was that we have all these discussions about AI, if you will. But AI was one of the primary mechanisms that helped to develop the mRNA vaccines that are now still the primary things that we use to get vaccinated against covid, because they the artificial intelligence. I'm not sure how artificial. It is, but was able to craft what became the vaccine in a few days. And scientists acknowledged, if they had to do it totally on their own, it would take years to have done what AI did in a few days.   Scott Hanton ** 15:13 The AI technology is amazing and powerful, but it's not new. No, I met a person who shared her story about AI investigations and talked about what she was doing in this field 30 years ago. Yeah, in her master's work. And you know, I knew it wasn't brand new, but I didn't really realize how deep its roots went until I talked to her.   Michael Hingson ** 15:37 I worked as my first jobs out of college with Ray Kurzweil, who, of course, nowadays, is well known for the singularity and so on. But back then, he developed the first reading machine that blind people could use to read printed material. And one of the things that he put into that machine was the ability, as it scanned more material, to learn and better recognize the material. And so he was doing machine learning back in the 1970s   Scott Hanton ** 16:07 right? And all of this is, you know, as Newton said on the shoulders of giants, right, right? He said it a bit cynically, but it's still true that we all in science, we are learning from each other. We're learning from the broader community, and we're integrating that knowledge as we tackle the challenges that we are exploring.   Michael Hingson ** 16:27 So what got you to go into chemistry when you went into college?   Scott Hanton ** 16:33 That's a good question. So when I was 13 years old, I went on a youth a church group youth trip to another city, and so they split us up, and there were three of us from our group that stayed overnight in a host family. And at dinner that night, the father worked in a pharmaceutical company, and he talked about the work he was doing, and what he was doing was really synthetic chemistry around small molecule drug discovery. And for me, it was absolutely fascinating. I was thrilled at that information. I didn't know any scientists growing up, I had no adult input other than teachers about science, and I can remember going back home and my parents asking me how the trip went. And it's like, it's fantastic. I'm going to be a chemist. And they both looked at me like, what is that? How do you make money from it? How do you get that? My dad was a banker. My mom was a school teacher. They had no scientific background, but that that one conversation, such serendipity, right? One conversation when I was 13 years old, and I came home and said, I'm going to be a chemist, and I've never really deviated from that path. Did you have other siblings? Younger brother and another younger sister?   Michael Hingson ** 17:54 Okay? Did they go into science by any remote chance?   Scott Hanton ** 17:58 Not at all. So they were both seventh grade teachers for more than 30 years. So my brother taught math and English, and my sister teaches social studies.   Michael Hingson ** 18:10 Well, there you go. But that is also important. I actually wanted to teach physics, but jobs and other things and circumstances took me in different directions, but I think the reality is that I ended up going into sales. And what I realized, and it was partly because of a Dale Carnegie sales course I took, but I realized that good sales people are really teachers, because they're really teaching people about products or about things, and they're also sharp enough to recognize what their products might or might not do to help a customer. But that, again, not everyone does that, but so I figure I still was teaching, and today, being a public speaker, traveling the world, talking, of course, about teamwork and other things, it's still all about teaching.   Scott Hanton ** 18:57 I think I've always been a teacher, and if you talk to my coworkers along the way, I enjoy helping people. I enjoy sharing my knowledge. There's always been a teacher inside but only in this job as the editorial director at lab manager have I really been able to do it directly. So we've developed what we call the lab manager Academy, and I create e learning courses to help lab managers be more successful, and it's been a passion project for me, and it's been a load of fun.   Michael Hingson ** 19:30 And it doesn't get better than that. It's always great when it's a load of fun, yes,   Scott Hanton ** 19:35 well, so you left college and you got a bachelor's and a master's degree, right? No masters for me, that step you went right to the old PhD, yeah. So I went straight. I went graduated from Michigan State. So Michigan State was on terms back in those days. So graduated in June, got married in July, moved to Wisconsin in August. To graduate school at the end of August at the University of Wisconsin. Okay? And my second year as a graduate student, my professor asked me, Do you want to stop and complete a master's? And I said, Wait, tell me about this word stop. And he said, Well, you'd have to finish the Master's requirements and write a thesis, and that's going to take some time. And I said, Do I have to and he said, No, and I don't recommend it. Just keep going forward and finish your PhD. So that's   Michael Hingson ** 20:30 and what does your wife do?   Scott Hanton ** 20:33 So my wife also is in the graduate program at the University of Wisconsin, and she decided that a master's degree was the right answer for her, because she didn't want to be a PhD scientist in XYZ narrow band of science. She wanted to be a master of chemistry. Okay, and so we took different paths through graduate school, but each of us took the path that worked best for us, and each pass has great value, so we're both happy with the choices that we made,   Michael Hingson ** 21:06 and complement each other and also give you, still lots of great things to talk about over dinner.   Scott Hanton ** 21:12 Absolutely. And she took that master's degree, went into the pharmaceutical industry and largely behaved as a librarian in her first part of her career, she wasn't called a librarian, but what she really did was a lot of information integrating, and then moved into the Library Group, and was a corporate librarian for a long time, and then a community librarian. So that path worked brilliantly for her. She also has a Masters of Library Science. So I have one PhD. She has two Master's degree. I have one bachelor's degree. She has two bachelor's degree.   Michael Hingson ** 21:50 Oh, so you can have interesting discussions about who really progressed further,   21:54 absolutely.   Michael Hingson ** 21:57 Well, that's, that's, that's cute, though. Well, I I got my bachelor's and master's. My wife, who I didn't meet until years later, wanted to be a librarian, but she ended up getting a a Master's at USC in so in sociology and and ended up getting a teaching credential and going into teaching, and taught for 10 years, and then she decided she wanted to do something different, and became a travel agent, which she had a lot of fun with. That is different, it is, but she enjoyed it, and along the way, then we got married. It was a great marriage. She was in a wheelchair her whole life. So she read, I pushed, worked out well, complimentary skills, absolutely, which is the way, way it ought to be, you know, and we had a lot of fun with it. Unfortunately, she passed now two and a half years ago, but as I tell people, we were married 40 years, and I'm sure she's monitoring me from somewhere, and if I misbehave, I'm going to hear about it, so I try to just behave. Sounds like good advice. Yeah, probably certainly the safe way to go. But we, we, we had lots of neat discussions, and our our activities and our expertise did, in a lot of ways, complement each other, so it was a lot of fun. And as I said, she went to USC. I enjoyed listening to USC football because I thought that that particular college team had the best announcers in the business, least when when I was studying in Southern California, and then when we got married, we learned the the day we got married, the wedding was supposed to start at four, and it didn't start till later because people weren't showing up for the wedding. And we learned that everybody was sitting out in their cars waiting for the end of the USC Notre Dame game. And we knew that God was on our side when we learned that SC beat the snot out of Notre Dame. So there you go. Yeah. Yeah. Oh gosh, the rivalries we face. So what did you do after college?   Scott Hanton ** 24:09 So did my PhD at the University of Wisconsin. And one of the nice things, a fringe benefit of going to a big, important program to do your PhD, is that recruiters come to you. And so I was able to do 40 different, four, zero, 40 different interviews on campus without leaving Madison. And one of those interviews was with a company called Air Products. And that worked out, and they hired me. And so we moved to Allentown, Pennsylvania to go to work. I went to work at Air Products and and Helen found a role in the pharmaceutical industry at Merck. And so we did that for a long time. I was initially a research expert, a PhD expert doing lasers and materials and analytical stuff. And over the years. I progressed up the ladder from researcher to supervisor to what did we call it, group head to Section Manager, to operations manager, and ultimately to General Manager.   Michael Hingson ** 25:13 Well, at least being in Allentown, you were close to a Cracker Barrel restaurant. Yes, that is true. That was the closest to one to where we lived in New Jersey, so we visited it several times. That's how I know   Scott Hanton ** 25:26 about it. Maybe we were there at the same time. Michael, maybe this isn't our first. It's   Michael Hingson ** 25:31 very possible. But we enjoyed Cracker Barrel and enjoyed touring around Pennsylvania. So I should have asked, What prompted you to go to the University of Wisconsin to do your your graduate work, as opposed to staying in Michigan. So   Scott Hanton ** 25:47 my advisor at Michigan State, our advisor at Michigan State, told us, here's the top five schools, graduate programs in chemistry, apply to them all. Go to the one you get into. And so I got into three. Helen got into two. The one that was the same was Wisconsin. So that's where we went, yeah?   Michael Hingson ** 26:09 Well, then no better logic and argument than that.   Scott Hanton ** 26:14 It was a great Madison. Wisconsin is a beautiful city. It one of the things I really liked about the chemistry program there then, and it's still true now, is how well the faculty get along together so many collaborative projects and just friendliness throughout the hallways. And yes, they are all competing at some level for grant support, but they get along so well, and that makes it for a very strong community,   Michael Hingson ** 26:41 and it probably also means that oftentimes someone who's applying for something can enlist support from other people who are willing to help.   Scott Hanton ** 26:50 And as a graduate student, it meant that I had more than one professor that I could go to my advisor. There was a whole group of advisors who ran joint group meetings and would give us advice about our work or our writing or our approach, or just because we needed a pep talk, because completing a PhD is hard. Yeah, right, so that community was really important to me, and it's something I took away that when I started my industrial career, I had seen the value of community, and I wanted to build stronger communities wherever I went, yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 27:26 So what does a company, does air products do   Scott Hanton ** 27:31 that's sort of in the name, right? They're an industrial gas company. Got some of their big, biggest products are taking air and separating it into its components of nitrogen, oxygen, oxygen, argon, whatever, right? But at that time, they also had a chemicals business and a semiconductor business, or electronics business. So there was a lot of chemistry going on, although a lot of my work colleagues were chemical engineers who were working on the gasses side of the business, we had significant number of chemistry, sorts material science, sorts of people who are working on the chemicals side. Now, over time, Air Products divested those businesses, and now it's much more of a true industrial gas company. But I had the opportunity to work in an integrated science company that did all sorts of things.   Michael Hingson ** 28:23 Yeah, and as as we know, certainly a little helium never hurt anyone.   Scott Hanton ** 28:30 No little helium, you know, raises people's spirits, it   Michael Hingson ** 28:34 does and their voices, it does. I I've visited helium tanks many times at UC Irvine when they had liquid helium, which was certainly a challenge because of how cold it had to be. But occasionally we would open a valve and little cold but useful helium gas would escape   Scott Hanton ** 28:56 very cold. Please be safe. Cryogens are are dangerous materials, and we gotta make sure we handle them with due respect.   Michael Hingson ** 29:05 Yeah, well, we, we all did and and didn't take too many chances. So it worked out pretty well. So you stayed in Allentown and you stayed with Air Products for how long   Scott Hanton ** 29:19 I was in Air Products for 20 years. So the analytical group that I was part of, we were about 92 or 93 people when I joined the company, when I just left after earning my PhD. After 20 years, that group was down to about 35 just progressive series of decisions that made the department smaller, and as the Department got smaller and smaller, we were worried about our abilities to sustain our work. And so a dear friend and a key colleague, Paula McDaniel, and I, worked to try to see what other kind of opportunities there were. Yeah. And so we reached out to a contract research organization called Intertech to see if they would be interested in maybe acquiring our analytical department. And when we called them, and by the way, we called them before we talked to our boss about it, she forgave us later, but when we called the guy on the end of the phone said, Wait a minute, let me get your file. And it's like, what you have a file on Air Products, analytical, really? Why? Well, it turned out that they had a file, and that they had an active Merger and Acquisition Group, and they wanted an integrated analytical department on the east coast of the US. And so we engaged in negotiation, and ultimately this analytical department was sold by Air Products to Intertech. So on Friday, we're a little cog in a giant engine of an global, international company, and our funding comes from Vice Presidents. And on Monday, we're a standalone business of 35 people, we need to write quotes in order to make money. So it was an enormous challenge to transition from a service organization to a business. But oh my goodness, did we learn a lot,   Michael Hingson ** 31:13 certainly a major paradigm shift,   Scott Hanton ** 31:18 and I was lucky that I lost the coin flip, and Paula won, and she said, I want to be business development director. And I said, thank God. So she went off to be the key salesperson, and Paula was utterly brilliant as a technical salesperson, and I became the operations manager, which allowed me to keep my hands dirty with the science and to work with the scientists and to build a system and a community that allowed us to be successful in a CRO world.   Michael Hingson ** 31:49 So at that time, when you became part, part of them, the new company, were you or the standalone business? Were you working in lab? Still yourself?   Scott Hanton ** 32:01 Yes. So I had the title Operations Manager and all of the scientific staff reported into me, but I was still the technical expert in some mass spectrometry techniques, particularly MALDI and also tough Sims, and so I still had hands on lab responsibility that I needed to deliver. And over time, I was able to train some people to take some of those responsibilities off. But when the weight of the world was particularly heavy, the place for me to go was in the lab and do some experiments.   Michael Hingson ** 32:34 Yeah, still so important to be able to keep your hand in into to know and understand. I know I had that same sort of need being the manager of an office and oftentimes working with other people who were the engineers, coming from a little bit of a technical background as well. I worked to always make sure I knew all I could about the products that I was dealing with and selling, and my sales people who worked for me constantly asked, How come, you know, all this stuff, and we don't then, my response always was, did you read the product bulletin that came out last week? Or have you kept up on the product bulletins? Because it's all right there, whether I actually physically repaired products or not, I knew how to do it. And so many times when I was involved in working with some of our engineers, I remember a few times our field support people, and we were working out of New Jersey, and then in New York at the time, in the World Trade Center, we had some customers up at Lockheed Martin, up in Syria, Rochester, I think it was. And the guys would go up, and then they'd call me on the phone, and we'd talk about it, and between us, we came up with some bright ideas. And I remember one day, all of a sudden, I get this phone call, and these guys are just bouncing off the walls, because whatever it was that was going on between them and me, we figured it out, and they put it in play and made it work, and they were all just as happy as clams at high tide, which is the way it ought to   Scott Hanton ** 34:13 be. It's great to work in a team that finds success. The longer I was in technical management, the more I enjoyed the success of the team. It didn't need to be my success anymore that helping the scientists be successful in their roles was truly satisfying,   Michael Hingson ** 34:33 and that helped you, by definition, be more successful in your role.   Scott Hanton ** 34:36 And no question, it could be seen as a selfish byproduct, but the fact is that it still felt really good.   Michael Hingson ** 34:43 Yeah, I hear you, because I know for me, I never thought about it as I've got to be successful. It's we've got problems to solve. Let's do it together. And I always told people that we're a team. And I have told every salesperson. I ever hired. I'm not here to boss you around. You've convinced me that you should be able to sell our products, and sometimes I found that they couldn't. But I said my job is to work with you to figure out how I can enhance what you do, and what skills do I bring to add value to you, because we've got to work together, and the people who understood that and who got it were always the most successful people that I ever had in my teams.   Scott Hanton ** 35:30 One of the things I strive to do as a leader of any organization is to understand the key strengths of the people on the team and to try to craft their roles in such a way that they spend the majority of their time executing their strengths. Yeah. I've also discovered that when I truly investigate poor performance, there's often a correlation between poor performance and people working in their weaknesses. Yeah, and if we can shift those jobs, change those roles, make change happen so that people can work more often in their strengths, then good things happen.   Michael Hingson ** 36:07 And if you can bring some of your skills into the mix and augment what they do, so much the better.   Scott Hanton ** 36:16 Yeah, because I'm just another member of the team, my role is different, but I need to also apply my strengths to the problems and be wary of my weaknesses, because as the leader of the organization, my words carried undue weight. Yeah, and if, if I was speaking or acting in a space where I was weak, people would still do what I said, because I had the most authority, and that was just a lose, lose proposition   Michael Hingson ** 36:43 by any standard. And and when you, when you operated to everyone's strengths, it always was a win. Yep, which is so cool. So you went to Intertech, and how long were you there?   Scott Hanton ** 36:57 I was at Intertech for 10 years, and work I can if you know, for any listeners out there who work in the CRO world, it is a tough business. It is a grind working in that business, yeah? So it was a lot of long hours and testy customers and shortages of materials and equipment that was a hard a hard a hard road to plow,   Michael Hingson ** 37:22 yeah, yeah, it gets to be frustrating. Sometimes it's what you got to do, but it still gets to be frustrating gets to be a challenge. The best part   Scott Hanton ** 37:32 for me was I had a great team. We had senior and junior scientists. They were good people. They worked hard. They fundamentally, they cared about the outcomes. And so it was a great group of people to work with. But the contract lab business is a tough business. Yeah, so when covid came, you know, the pandemic settles in, all the restrictions are coming upon us. I was tasked as the General Manager of the business with setting up all the protocols, you know, how are we going to meet the number of people this basing the masks, you know, how could we work with and we were essential as a lab, so we had to keep doing what we were doing. And it took me about a week to figure non stop work to figure out what our protocols were going to be, and the moment I turned them into my boss, then I got laid off. So what you want to do in a time of crisis is you want to let go of the the general manager, the safety manager, the quality manager and the Chief Scientist, because those are four people that you don't need during times of stress or challenge or crisis. On the plus side for me, getting laid off was a bad hour. It hurt my pride, but after an hour, I realized that all the things that I'd been stressing about for years trying to run this business were no longer my problem. Yeah, and I found that it was a tremendous weight lifted off my shoulders to not feel responsible for every problem and challenge that that business had.   Michael Hingson ** 39:14 And that's always a good blessing when you when you figure that out and don't worry about the the issues anymore. That's a good thing. It was certainly   Scott Hanton ** 39:25 good for me. Yeah, so I'm not going to recommend that people go get laid off. No world to get fired. But one problem that I had is because Paula and I worked to create that business, I sort of behaved like an owner, but was treated like an employee. And my recommendation to people is, remember, you're an employee, find some personal boundaries that protect you from the stress of the business, because you're not going to be rewarded or treated like an owner.   Michael Hingson ** 39:58 Yeah, because you're not because. Or not.   Scott Hanton ** 40:01 So I got laid off. It was in the height of the pandemic. So, you know, I'm too busy of a human being to sort of sit in a rocking chair and watch the birds fly by. That's not my style or my speed. So I started a consulting business, and that was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed doing the consulting work, but I learned something really important about myself, and that's that while I can sell and I can be an effective salesperson, I don't like selling, and as a company of one, when I didn't sell, I didn't make any money, yeah, and so I needed to figure out something else to do, because I really hated selling, and I wasn't doing it. I was procrastinating, and that made the business be unpredictable and very choppy   Michael Hingson ** 40:51 in that company of one, that guy who was working for you wasn't really doing all that you wanted.   Scott Hanton ** 40:56 Exactly the Yeah, you know me as the founder, was giving me as the salesman, a poor performance review was not meeting objectives. So I had a long time volunteer relationship with lab manager magazine. I had been writing articles for them and speaking for them in webinars and in conferences for a long time, probably more than 10 years, I would say, and they asked me as a consultant to produce a a to a proposal to create the lab manager Academy. So the the founder and owner of the the company, the lab X Media Group, you really saw the value of an academy, and they needed it done. They needed it done. They couldn't figure it out themselves. So I wrote the proposal. I had a good idea of how to do it, but I was new to consulting, and I struggled with, how do I get paid for this? And I had four ideas, but I didn't like them, so I slept on it, and in the morning I had a fifth, which said, hire me full time. I sent in the proposal. An hour later, I had a phone call. A week later, I had a job, so that worked out fantastic. And I've really enjoyed my time at lab manager magazine. Great people, fun work. It's really interesting to me to be valued for what I know rather than for what I can do. Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 42:23 the two relate. But still, it does need to be more about what you know, what you really bring, as opposed to what you can do, because what you can do in general probably is an offshoot of what you know.   Scott Hanton ** 42:38 So this gives me the opportunity to help lots of people. So on the outside of the company, I'm writing articles, creating courses, giving talks to help lab managers. Because I was a lab manager for a long time, yeah, over 20 years, and I know what those challenges are. I know how hard that job is, and I know how many decisions lab managers need to make, and it's wonderful to be able to share my experience and help them, and I am motivated to help them. So was it hard? Oh, go ahead, on the inside, I'm literally an internal subject matter expert, and so I can coach and teach and help my colleagues with what's the science? What do lab managers really think? How do we pitch this so that it resonates with lab managers, and I think that helps make all of our products better and more successful.   Michael Hingson ** 43:31 So was it hard? Well, I guess best way to put it is that, was it really hard to switch from being a scientist to being a lab manager and then going into being a subject matter expert and really out of the laboratory. So   Scott Hanton ** 43:48 people ask me all the time, Scott, don't you miss being in the lab and doing experiments? And my answer is, I miss being in the lab. And I do miss being in the lab. You know, on very stressful days at Intertech, I'd go in the lab and I'd do an experiment, yeah, because it was fun, and I had more control over the how the experiment was run and what I would learn from it than I did running a business. But the flip side of that is, I do experiments all the time. What I learned as the general manager of a business was the scientific method works. Let's data hypothesis. Let's figure out how to test it. Let's gather data, and let's see if the hypothesis stands or falls. And we ran a business that way, I think, pretty successfully. And even now, in in media and publishing, we still run experiments all the time. And it's kind of funny that most of my editorial colleagues that I work with, they think my favorite word is experiment. My favorite word is still why, but we talk all the time now about doing experiments, and that was a new thing for them, but now we can do continual improvement more in a more dedicated way, and we do it a lot faster. Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 45:00 yeah. So what's the hardest thing you think about being a lab manager?   Scott Hanton ** 45:06 I think the hardest thing about let me answer that with two. I'm not going to be able to narrow it down to one, so I'll give you two. The first one is you transform, maybe one day to the next, from really being in control of your science and working with whether it's animals or rocks or electrons or chemicals, whatever you're working with, having a great degree of knowledge and a lot of control, and the next day, you're hurting cats. And so it's about that transition from having control over your destiny to influencing people to get the work done, and working with people instead of working with experiments, that's really hard. The second is, as a lab manager, there's endless decisions, and so combating decision fatigue is a big deal, and everybody in the lab depends upon you for the decisions you make. And it's not that every decision has to be perfect, you know, that's just a different failure mode if you try to make perfect decisions, but every decision needs to be made promptly. And as a scientist, I could always make more data in order to make a better decision, but as a lab manager, I would often only have maybe 40 or 50% of the data I wanted, and a decision had to be made. And getting comfortable making decisions in the face of uncertainty is really hard.   Michael Hingson ** 46:29 So certainly, being a lab manager or Well, dealing with managers in the way we're talking about it here, has to be very stressful. How do you how do you cope with the stress?   Scott Hanton ** 46:42 So I think ways to cope with the stress successfully is, first of all, you've got to take care of yourself. You know, we've all flown on airplanes, and what is the safety person in the aisle or on the video? Do oxygen masks will fall from the ceiling, and what do we do with them? We put them on before we help somebody else, right? We all know that. But in the workplace, especially as a manager, it's hard to remember that as we care for our team and try and take care of our team, there might not be enough time or energy or capacity left to take care of ourselves, but if we don't fill that gas tank every day doing something, then we can't help our team. And so one way to deal with the stress is to make sure that you take care of yourself. So   Michael Hingson ** 47:28 what do you do? How do you deal with that? So   Scott Hanton ** 47:31 for me, ways that I can reinvigorate is one. I like being outside and get my hands dirty. So I'm not really a gardener, but I call myself a yard dinner. So I grow grass and I grow flowers, and I trim trees, and I want to go outside, and I want to see immediate return on my effort, and I want it to be better than when I started. And it's good if I have to clean from under my fingernails when I'm doing it. Another thing I like to do is I play all kinds of games I'm happy to play, sorry, with little kids, or I'll play complicated strategy games with people who want to sit at a table for three or four hours at a time. Yeah? And that allows my brain to spin and to work but on something completely different. Yeah. And another thing that's been important for me, especially when I was a lab manager is to be involved in youth coaching, so I coached kids soccer and basketball and baseball teams, and it's just beautiful to be out there on a field with a ball, with kids. And you know, the worries of the world just aren't there. The kids don't know anything about them. And it's fun to work with the ones who are really good, but it's equally fun to work with the ones who have never seen the ball before, and to help them do even the most basic things. And that kind of giving back and paying it forward, that sort of stuff fills my tank.   Michael Hingson ** 48:51 Yeah, I empathize a lot with with that. For me, I like to read. I've never been much of a gardener, but I also collect, as I mentioned before, old radio shows, and I do that because I'm fascinated by the history and all the things I learned from what people did in the 2030s, 40s and 50s, being on radio, much Less getting the opportunity to learn about the technical aspects of how they did it, because today it's so different in terms of how one edits, how one processes and deals with sounds and so on, but it's but it's fun to do something just totally different than way maybe what your normal Job would be, and and I do love to interact with with people. I love to play games, too. I don't get to do nearly as much of it as I'd like, but playing games is, is a lot of fun,   Scott Hanton ** 49:52 and I agree, and it it's fun, it's diverting, it's it helps me get into a flow so that I'm focused on. Me on one thing, and I have no idea how much time has gone by, and I don't really care. You know, people who play games with me might question this. I don't really care if I win or lose. Certainly I want to win, but it's more important to me that I play well, and if somebody plays better, good for   Michael Hingson ** 50:14 them, great. You'll learn from it. Exactly. Do you play   Scott Hanton ** 50:18 chess? I have played chess. I've played a lot of chess. What I've learned with chess is that I'm not an excellent I'm a good player, but not an excellent player. And when I run into excellent players, they will beat me without even breaking a sweat.   Michael Hingson ** 50:34 And again, in theory, you learn something from that.   Scott Hanton ** 50:37 What I found is that I don't really want to work that hard and yeah. And so by adding an element of chance or probability to the game, the people who focus on chess, where there are known answers and known situations, they get thrown off by the uncertainty of the of the flip the card or roll the dice. And my brain loves that uncertainty, so I tend to thrive. Maybe it's from my time in the lab with elements of uncertainty, where the chess players wilt under elements of uncertainty, and it's again, it's back to our strengths, right? That's something that I'm good at, so I'm gonna go do it. I've   Michael Hingson ** 51:20 always loved Trivial Pursuit. That's always been a fun game that I enjoy playing. I   Scott Hanton ** 51:25 do love Trivial Pursuit. I watch Jeopardy regularly. A funny story, when we moved into our new house in Pennsylvania, it was a great neighborhood. Loved the neighbors there. When we first moved in, they invited my wife and I to a game night. Excellent. We love games. We're going to play Trivial Pursuit. Awesome like Trivial Pursuit. We're going to play as couples. Bad idea, right? Let's play boys against the girls, or, let's say, random draws. No, we're playing as couples. Okay, so we played as couples. Helen and I won every game by a large margin. We were never invited back for game night. Yeah, invited back for lots of other things, but not game night.   Michael Hingson ** 52:06 One of the things that, and I've talked about it with people on this podcast before, is that all too often, when somebody reads a question from a trivial pursuit card, an answer pops in your head, then you went, Oh, that was too easy. That can't be the right answer. So you think about it, and you answer with something else, but invariably, that first answer was always the correct answer.   Scott Hanton ** 52:32 Yes, I'm I have learned to trust my intuition. Yeah. I learned, as a research scientist, that especially in talking to some of my peers, who are very dogmatic, very step by step scientists. And they lay out the 20 steps to that they felt would be successful. And they would do one at a time, one through 20. And that made them happy for me, I do one and two, and then I'd predict where that data led me, and I do experiment number seven, and if it worked, I'm off to eight. And so I they would do what, one step at a time, one to 20, and I'd sort of do 127, 1420, yeah. And that I learned that that intuition was powerful and valuable, and I've learned to trust it. And in my lab career, it served me really well. But also as a manager, it has served me well to trust my intuition, and at least to listen to it. And if I need to analyze it, I can do that, but I'm going to listen to it,   Michael Hingson ** 53:31 and that's the important thing, because invariably, it's going to give you useful information, and it may be telling you not what to do, but still trusting it and listening to it is so important, I've found that a lot over the years,   Scott Hanton ** 53:47 Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called Blink, where he talks about the power of the subconscious, and his claim is that the subconscious is 100,000 times smarter than our conscious brain, and I think when we are trusting our intuition, we're tapping into that super computer that's in our skulls. If you want to learn more, read blank. It's a great story.   Michael Hingson ** 54:10 I hear you. I agree. How can people learn to be better leaders and managers?   Scott Hanton ** 54:18 So I think it's there's really three normal ways that people do this. One is the power of experiment, right? And I did plenty of that, and I made tons of errors. It's painful. It's irritating, trial and error, but I used to tell people at Intertech that I was the general manager because I'd made the most mistakes, which gave me the most opportunity to learn. It was also partly because a lot of my peers wanted nothing to do with the job. You know, they wanted to be scientists. Another way is we, we get coached and mentored by people around us, and that is awesome if you have good supervisors, and it's tragic if you have bad supervisors, because you don't know any better and you take for granted. That the way it's been done is the way it needs to be done, and that prevents us from being generative leaders and questioning the status quo. So there's problems there, too. And I had both good and bad supervisors during my career. I had some awful, toxic human beings who were my supervisors, who did damage to me, and then I had some brilliant, caring, empathetic people who raised me up and helped me become the leader that I am today. So it's a bit of a crap shoot. The third way is go out and learn it from somebody who's done it right, and that's why we generated the lab manager Academy to try to codify all the mistakes I made and what are the learnings from them? And when I'm talking with learners who are in the program, it's we have a huge positive result feedback on our courses. And what I talk to people about who take our courses is I'm glad you appreciate what we've put together here. That makes me feel good. I'm glad it's helping you. But when these are my mistakes and the answers to my mistakes, when you make mistakes, you need to in the future, go make some courses and teach people what the lessons were from your mistakes and pay it forward. Yeah. So I recommend getting some training.   Michael Hingson ** 56:17 What's the difference between management and leadership?   Scott Hanton ** 56:21 I particularly love a quote from Peter Drucker. So Peter Drucker was a professor in California. You may have heard of him before.   Michael Hingson ** 56:29 I have. I never had the opportunity to meet him, but I read.   Scott Hanton ** 56:34 I didn't either material. I've read his books, and I think he is an insightful human being, yes. So the quote goes like this, management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things. So as a technical manager, there's a bunch of things we have to get right. We have to get safety right. We have to get quality right. There's an accuracy and precision that we need to get right for our outcomes and our results. Those are management tasks, but leadership is about doing the right things. And the interesting thing about that definition is it doesn't require a title or a role or any level of authority. So anyone can be a leader if you're consistently doing the right things, you are exhibiting leadership, and that could be from the person sweeping the floors or the person approving the budget, or anyone in between.   Michael Hingson ** 57:33 Yeah, I've heard that quote from him before, and absolutely agree with it. It makes a whole lot of sense.   Scott Hanton ** 57:41 Other definitions that I've seen trying to distinguish management and leadership tend to use the words manage and lead, and I don't like definitions that include the words that they're trying to define. They become circular at some level. This one, I think, is clear about it, what its intention is, and for me, it has worked through my career, and so the separation is valuable. I have authority. I'm the manager. I have accountability to get some stuff right, but anyone can lead, and everyone can lead, and the organization works so much better when it's full of leaders   Michael Hingson ** 58:21 and leaders who are willing to recognize when they bring something to the table, or if someone else can add value in ways that they can't, to be willing to let the other individual take the leadership position for a while.   Scott Hanton ** 58:40 Absolutely, and you know that really comes down to building an environment and a culture that's supportive. And so Amy Edmondson has written extensively on the importance of psychological safety, and that psychological safety hinges on what you just said, right? If the guy who sweeps the floor has an observation about the organization. Do they feel safe to go tell the person in charge that this observation, and if they feel safe, and if that leader is sufficiently vulnerable and humble to listen with curiosity about that observation, then everybody benefits, yeah, and the more safe everyone feels. We think about emotion. Emotional safety is they anyone can bring their best self to work, and psychological safety is they can contribute their ideas and observations with no threat of retaliation, then we have an environment where we're going to get the best out of everybody, yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 59:46 which is the way it it really ought to be. And all too often we don't necessarily see it, but that is the way it ought   Scott Hanton ** 59:53 to be. Too many people are worried about credit, or, I don't know, worried about things that I don't see. Yeah, and they waste human potential, right? They they don't open their doors to hire anybody. They they judge people based on what they look like instead of who they are, or they box people in into roles, and don't let them flourish and Excel. And whenever you're doing those kinds of things, you're wasting human potential. And businesses, science and business are too hard to waste human potential. We need to take advantage of everything that people are willing to give. Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 1:00:33 we've been doing this for quite a while already today. So I'm going to ask as a kind of a last question, what, what advice do you want to leave for people to think about going forward in their lives and in their careers?   Scott Hanton ** 1:00:48 So I was participating in a LinkedIn chat today where a professor was asking the question, what sort of advice would you wish you got when you were 21 Okay, so it was an interesting thread, and there was one contributor to the thread who said something I thought was particularly valuable. And she said, attitude matters. Attitude matters. We can't control what happens to us, but we can control how we deal with it and how we respond, right? And so I think if we can hold our attitude as our accountability, and we can direct our strengths and our talents to applying them against the challenges that the business or the science or the lab or the community faces, and we can go in with some positive attitude and positive desire for for change and improvement, and we can be vulnerable and humble enough to accept other people's ideas and to interact through discussion and healthy debate. Then everything's better. I also like Kelleher his quote he was the co founder of Southwest Airlines, and he said, when you're hiring, hire for attitude, train for skill. Attitude is so important. So I think, understand your attitude. Bring the attitude you want, the attitude you value, the attitude that's that's parallel to your core values. And then communicate to others about their attitude and how it's working or not working for them.   Michael Hingson ** 1:02:31 And hopefully, if they have a positive or good enough attitude, they will take that into consideration and grow because of it absolutely   Scott Hanton ** 1:02:41 gives everybody the chance to be the best they can be.   Michael Hingson ** 1:02:47 Well, Scott, this has been wonderful. If people want to reach out to you, how can they do that?   Scott Hanton ** 1:02:51 So LinkedIn is great. I've provided Michael my LinkedIn connection. So I would love to have people connect to me on LinkedIn or email. S Hanson at lab manager.com love to have interactions with the folks out there.   Michael Hingson ** 1:03:08 Well, I want to thank you for spending so much time. We'll have to do more of this.   Scott Hanton ** 1:03:13 Michael, I really enjoyed it. This was a fun conversation. It was stimulating. You asked good questio

In this episode, Dan Sixsmith interviews Stevie Case, the CRO of Vanta, discussing her unique career journey, the current state of B2B sales, and the importance of customer retention and growth strategies. They explore how Vanta integrates AI into its solutions and the significance of building a personal brand in sales. Stevie shares insights on leadership, motivating diverse teams, and her definition of success, emphasizing the importance of passion and authenticity in sales.TakeawaysVanta focuses on trust management, compliance, and security.Stevie's role as CRO involves driving top-line revenue growth.Sales should prioritize delivering customer value and building trust.AI is transforming the way businesses operate and sell.Stevie's journey from gaming to tech highlights the importance of leaning into discomfort.Leadership today requires adapting to an AI-driven landscape.Motivating teams involves showing up and sharing a clear vision.Building a personal brand is crucial for sales professionals.Authenticity in social media can enhance professional relationships.Success is defined by having a rich and interesting life.Chapters00:00 Introduction to Vanta and Stevie Case's Role04:22 The State of B2B Sales Today10:05 Customer Retention and Growth Strategies13:09 Integrating AI into Business Solutions16:48 Stevie Case's Unique Career Journey26:41 Leadership Evolution and Style29:28 Motivating a Diverse Team32:24 Building a Personal Brand in Sales35:38 Influences and Definitions of Success

Did AI actually kill SEO? Or are recent traffic drops for sites like HubSpot a sign of something else entirely? In this episode, we're joined by Sam Dunning, founder of Breaking B2B and a leading expert on search strategy, to unpack what's actually happening in the world of SEO. We talk about how AI overviews are changing the way people find information, and what it all means for marketers and revenue teams.Sam shares when SEO still makes sense, when it doesn't, and what to focus on if you want to drive real pipeline today. We also dive into AI-generated content, the role of brand in LLM-driven search, and how to build a practical keyword strategy that works in 2025.(00:00) - Introduction (01:58) - Did AI kill SEO? (06:17) - When SEO doesn't make sense (10:05) - Does SEO still take forever to build? (12:24) - Should we just generate AI content? (15:39) - Buidling a Money Keyword Matrix (22:20) - Who should own the matrix? (24:45) - Quicker vs longer strategies (29:07) - Old school SEO in a world of LLMs (34:08) - Brand builders have a step up (36:21) - Common LLM hacks (43:00) - Measuring SEO in a world of LLMs (48:24) - Nothing's changed. Everything's changed. (50:29) - Wrapping up

What if the smartest thing you could do as a leader... was make yourself unnecessary?  In an era where AI is changing how we work and lead, tech executive Amber Winter proves that success isn't about working harder—it's about working smarter.  From her start as a marketing coordinator to becoming CEO in just eight years, Amber shares how she's used continuous learning, smart delegation, and artificial intelligence to lead high-performing teams without burning out. In this episode, she opens up about what it really takes to scale your leadership while staying human in a tech-driven world.  "Relationships are your superpower." — Amber Winter Amber reminds us that even with AI on your side, people still matter most. What You'll Learn in This Episode: How Amber uses AI tools to scenario-plan, prioritize, and problem-solve on the fly Her "tour of duty" approach to leadership—and why it's a game-changer for growth What she learned from creating AI agents for her teams (and trying to make herself unnecessary) A real talk moment that taught her the power of clear, human-centered communication The career path that took her from coordinator to CEO to CRO—without following a traditional roadmap Why treating people as individuals (not resources) leads to stronger results How AI can help uncover blind spots, support strategic thinking, and prep leaders for tough conversations  ✨ Want to lead smarter, not harder? Start by reflecting on how you show up—and where AI   can amplify your strengths.

In this Short, Chris Merritt, former CRO of Cloudflare, shares insights on scaling from single-digit millions to $1 billion in ARR. He discusses why trust is the foundation for enterprise sales, how to balance customer feedback across different segments, and what it takes to earn the right to handle large enterprise contracts. What You'll Learn: How to build trust with enterprise customers Why product feedback from smaller customers matters The pyramid approach to scaling revenue How to earn the right to handle large contracts ALL ABOUT UNICORN BAKERY: https://zez.am/unicornbakery  Where to find Chris: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cmerritt99/  Website: https://www.cloudflare.com/de-de/  Join our Founder Tactics Newsletter: 2x die Woche bekommst du die Taktiken der besten Gründer der Welt direkt ins Postfach: https://www.tactics.unicornbakery.de/

Send us a textProject Phoenix is me re-organizing my life. I got an offer to be a CRO and instead of taking it, I quit my job, sold my honeybees, and decided to run a half marathon. I started my own business called, "Fancy Quant LLC" where I will consult in quant research, risk management, career development, and academic program consulting and advisory services.For opportunities contact me on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/dimitri-bianco/OVVO Labs is a proud sponsor of Talking Tuesday with Fancy Quant!www.OVVOLabs.comSupport the show

Consistency beats charisma in frontline sales leadership. In this episode of Coach2Scale, VMware Carbon Black's Head of Sales Development, Victoria Abeling, shared what it takes to build a high-performance team when everyone's overworked and every 1:1 is at risk of being replaced by a pipeline review. She unpacks why many reps view coaching as punitive, how that culture was unintentionally built over decades, and the mindset shift required to make coaching a trusted, productive habit, not a compliance exercise.Victoria offers a pragmatic breakdown of how she uses quarterly operating cadences, individualized development plans, and coaching conversations grounded in deal inspection to uncover skill gaps, not just red flags. You'll hear how to coach for discovery, disqualify with confidence, and push back on the myth that high performers don't need help. If you're a sales leader tired of playing firefighter, or a CRO wondering why the pipeline isn't growing with headcount, this conversation will reframe how you think about performance management and the role cadence plays in building trust, accountability, and results.Top Takeaways1. Coaching is not punitive; it's a performance multiplier.Many reps assume coaching signals underperformance, but reframing it as a skill-development tool builds trust and accountability.2. Consistency in 1:1s is non-negotiable.Coaching only drives behavior change when it follows a predictable cadence; skipping sessions sends the message that development is optional.3. Top performers need coaching too.Even the best reps have blind spots, and coaching them to sharpen specific skills is how you go from 100% to 130% of quota.4. Quarterly operating rhythms help leaders avoid reactive management.Structuring the year into coaching and development cycles keeps leaders proactive, not just in-the-weeds on deals.5. Coaching must go beyond the deal to address the “how,” not just the “what.”Managers who only review pipelines miss opportunities to build long-term skills like discovery, negotiation, and qualification.6. Disqualification is as valuable as closing.Teaching reps to say “no” to the wrong opportunities frees them to invest time in the right ones and protects forecast accuracy.7. Modern buyers are informed; sellers must be sharper in discovery.With buyers doing most of the research on their own, reps must master early discovery to stay relevant and competitive.8. Leaders must learn to receive feedback without defensiveness.Victoria shares how this mindset shift helped her grow as a leader and foster stronger coaching relationships.9. How you show up matters, even on Zoom.From attire to preparation, professionalism in remote settings still signals credibility and respect.10. Coach the individual, not the scoreboard.Coaching should focus on skills that compound over time, not just pressing for this month's number.

How did Tripadvisor become every traveler's starting point?Steve Kaufer joins Joubin Mirzadegan on Grit to break down how Tripadvisor became the internet's trusted travel companion, built on over a billion reviews and decades of trust. He also shares why early personalization fell short and how AI is finally doing what travel agents once did by understanding the traveler, but faster, smarter, and at scale.Guest: Steve Kaufer, co-founder of TripAdvisorChapters:(00:00) Trailer(00:45) Introduction(01:32) Early days of Tripadvisor(08:14) Catching the startup bug(18:42) Luck and timing(26:54) $200M: a combo of money and risk(37:37) I love creating stuff(40:45) Hardest part of being a public CEO(46:21) Never let a good crisis go to waste(51:54) An average traveler(55:49) Social proof vs artificial intelligence(1:02:59) Back in the saddle(1:09:54) Not for the faint of heart(1:12:16) What “grit” means to Steve(1:12:31) OutroMentioned in this episode: Google, Expedia Group, Barry Diller, Interactive Corporation (IAC), Uber, Dara Khosrowshahi, OpenAI ChatGPT, IMDb, CJ Affiliate (Commission Junction), Amazon, Google Chrome, Give Freely, Honey, Rakuten, Macy's, American Cancer Society, Google GeminiLinks:Connect with SteveXLinkedInConnect with JoubinXLinkedInEmail: grit@kleinerperkins.comLearn more about Kleiner Perkins

Mike Murphy, founder and managing partner of Sunstone Management Advisors, has worn the CEO, COO and CRO hats across three decades in healthcare and insurance. In this episode he recounts how he launched a cold‑start insurance division that rocketed to $435 million in revenue and $22 million in EBITDA in just four years, and now clears the $1 billion mark. He even delivered 18% revenue growth and a 40% EBITDA jump within his first year steering three merged healthcare entities.At the heart of his success was the “greenhouse” experiment: an in‑house test market where agents sold competitor products so Murphy's own offering had to prove itself at every turn. He explains why running as if you're cash‑starved from day one forces ruthless discipline and how that early mindset continues to separate winners from wishful thinkers.You'll also hear the deceptively simple A + B = C check that Mike uses to expose false premises—if great people plus a good product still don't hit targets, something fundamental is broken. When his leadership team argued over how much change was needed to reach a $1 billion valuation, he improvised a 1–10 “change scale” to pin down hidden disagreements and avoid collective denial.Healthcare operators and real‑estate investors alike will gain clear, battle‑tested advice on commanding your P&L before negotiations, building feedback loops that surface inconvenient truths fast, and resisting the temptation to chalk up disasters or windfalls to one‑offs. Tune in for every unvarnished lesson on execution, data‑driven decisions, and the high‑stakes experiments that turn uncertainty into predictable wins.If you need help finding the perfect location or your ready to invest in commercial real estate, email us at admin@leadersre.com Sign up for a FREE vulnerability analysis and lease renewal services View our library on apple podcasts or REUniversity.org. Connect on Facebook. Commercial Real Estate Secrets is ranked in the top 50 podcasts on real estate

In this short segment of the Revenue Builders Podcast, we revisit the discussion with Shopify's CRO Bobby Morrison. We dive into the transformational "pod structure" they've adopted to align cross-functional teams more closely with customer outcomes. Drawing on lessons from his tenure at Microsoft, Morrison explains how Shopify's industry-specific pods streamline collaboration across sales, solution engineers, marketing, and customer success—leading to improved speed, accountability, and customer satisfaction. He also reveals how aligning incentives within these pods reduces internal friction and creates scalable, enterprise-grade execution. This episode is packed with strategic insight for CROs, sales leaders, and go-to-market operators aiming to drive operational efficiency and growth.KEY TAKEAWAYS[00:00:28] Shopify's shift to 16 industry-specific pods was designed to bring cross-functional teams closer to the customer.[00:01:00] Each pod includes sales, solution engineering, launch engineers, and partners all aligned around a single outcome.[00:02:00] At Microsoft, the team spent 70% of their time on internal orchestration, highlighting the inefficiency of siloed roles.[00:03:00] Shopify's pod structure includes defined primary and secondary roles with centralized responsibility and incentives.[00:03:49] All roles in a pod are measured against the same customer cohort, improving continuity and reducing disruption.[00:04:12] Morrison explains how aligning marketing with outcomes (not just MQLs) is helping Shopify eliminate interdepartmental friction.[00:05:00] Shopify is close to assigning at-risk compensation to marketing teams based on segment performance—creating real ownership.[00:05:49] The pod model drives faster decisions, stronger accountability, and less tug-of-war between siloed departments.QUOTES[00:01:00] "All aligned around a single outcome, which is helping our customers win."[00:02:39] "A sales rep could have as many as 87 different people they're working with internally to hit their objective."[00:03:49] "Now the pods are incentivized off of the same customer cohort."[00:04:59] "We're very close to assigning at-risk targets to our marketing team."[00:05:49] "Less tug-of-war that happens between siloed parts of the organization that have different KPIs."Listen to the full conversation through the link below.https://revenue-builders.simplecast.com/episodes/ai-driven-sales-innovation-with-bobby-morrisonEnjoying the podcast? Sign up to receive new episodes straight to your inbox:https://hubs.li/Q02R10xN0Check out John McMahon's book here:Amazon Link: https://a.co/d/1K7DDC4Check out Force Management's Ascender platform here: https://my.ascender.co/Ascender/

Talia Wolf is an internationally recognized conversion optimization expert, keynote speaker, and founder of GetUplift—one of the world's leading CRO agencies. She pioneered the concept of emotional targeting, a transformative marketing approach that taps into what customers truly feel and need. In this episode, Talia breaks down her four-step emotional targeting framework and shares how brands can dramatically boost conversions by crafting messages that connect on a human level. If you're tired of copycat marketing and want to create powerful customer experiences that truly resonate, this episode is a must-listen. 00:00 Introduction 01:04 Introduction to Talia Wolf 01:43 Defining Emotional Targeting 02:24 Common Website Mistakes and Emotional Targeting Approach 04:29 Limitations of Traditional Marketing Personas 05:46 Research Methods for Emotional Targeting 06:32 Ethics of Emotional Targeting 07:47 The Emotional Hook in Decision Making 08:25 Case Study: Teamwork and Customer-Centric Messaging 10:44 Honesty and Addressing Customer Pain Points 12:18 Overview of the Four-Step Emotional Targeting Framework 12:22 Step 1 & 2: Research and Synthesizing Insights 13:19 Step 3: Emotional Targeting Audit 14:29 Step 4: Running Meaningful Tests 15:25 Using Customer Language and AI in Emotional Targeting 17:09 Challenges and Importance of A/B Testing 20:51 Becoming Emotional Detectives 22:15 Closing and Contact Information Rate, Review, & Follow If you liked this episode, please rate and review the show. Let us know what you loved most about the episode. Struggling with strategy? Unlock your free AI-powered prompts now and start building a winning strategy today!

Guests: Garrett Lord, co-founder and CEO of Handshake; and Mamoon Hamid, partner at Kleiner Perkins.Handshake set out to democratize career opportunity. In the process, it unlocked something more: a high-trust expert network built on verified talent and earned trust.This week on Grit, Garrett Lord shares how what began as a platform for student job seekers is now partnering with leading labs, enabling experts to train real-world AI systems. He explains how owning verified domain talent has become their core strategic edge, bypassing middlemen and turning a decade of trust into lasting advantage.Connect with Garrett LordXLinkedInConnect with JoubinXLinkedInEmailConnect with MamoonXLinkedInLearn more about Kleiner Perkins